The Walking Dead season 9, episode 12 recap: Guardians

This week’s episode of The Walking Dead proves Henry is not the smartest of the bunch.

The Walking Dead shows us a side of the Whisperers that we imagined but didn’t expect in this week’s episode, “Guardians”. The episode spends a lot of time with the frightening bunch and illustrates just how brutal and relentless they can be, especially Alpha. This week finally brought a big comic book character into the mix in the form of Beta. Not sure about anyone else, but Alpha still scares me the most.

After getting Lydia from Hilltop, Alpha is very curious to know about the community–who they are, how they’ve managed. It becomes clear to Lydia that her mom doesn’t care about her at all, she’s just fishing for any information she can get. But as the episode goes on, Alpha becomes hesitant to believe anything Lydia has to say about the thriving community she was just captured in.

Things get worse when Henry (he’s just ridiculous, isn’t he?) catches up the Whisperer herd and gets caught by Beta (yes!) and is handed over to Alpha. It is quite the stupid move on Henry’s part because A) he doesn’t even know Lydia, and B) Who in the hell is trying to go up against a group of people who wear the faces of the dead? Henry totally deserved that sucker punch from Lydia after she denies being his friend. Oh, Henry.

Later on in the episode, Henry witnesses firsthand what happens when you piss Alpha off. After a couple dares to speak up to her, she not only slices off the head of the woman with a razor-sharp string of some sort but also kills the man with a swift stab to the gut. At this point, Alpha is pretty convinced that there is something going on between Henry and Lydia and fresh from her rage kill, she’s ready to prove it.

To see how Lydia reacts, Alpha asks her naive daughter to kill Henry knowing that she wouldn’t because she had become “weak”. But the test is cut short as Daryl and Connie infiltrate the camp posing as Whisperers and rescue them.

At the Hilltop, things are heating up as Michonne displays her disapproval for how things have been handled in her presence. Furthermore, she wants the Hilltop to have nothing to do with the upcoming fair. Siddiq and other members of the council are not in agreement over this one-sided executive decision and ask Michonne to reconsider.

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There’s a bit of a love quadrangle going on in The Walking Dead between Rosita and her three men–Siddiq, Eugene, and Gabriel. Basically, she’s dating Gabriel, is pregnant with Siddiq’s baby and is the object of Eugene’s affection. By the episode’s end, it seems like all is working out for them, that is except for Eugene who is forever lurking in the distance.

Michonne learns that Judith has a soft spot for Negan and that she fills Negan in regularly about what’s going on at the Hilltop. While her empathy for Negan is adorable, Judith doesn’t have the slightest clue what this man was once capable of. But something tells me he’s changed, but still, how do we learn to trust him?

After a few wise words from Judith, Michonne changes her mind about the fair and decides she won’t vote against it–even though she wants to. Comic book fans know the fair is a big turning point in the story, and now that Michonne has given the green light to go, it’s about to get all sorts of crazy.

The Walking Dead airs every Sunday on AMC at 9 PM EST!