REVIEW: The Walking Dead, S10 Ep7 – Open Your Eyes

The penultimate episode of the first half of The Walking Dead season ten was yet another busy episode, filled with betrayal and manipulation and another character death.

Poor Siddiq has been put through the ringer all through this season. His traumatic experience at Alpha’s hands last season has had lasting effects on his wellbeing and it’s a miracle he has managed to be fairly functional all this time, still fulfilling his role as a doctor and helping as many people as he could. But that painful ordeal took its toll on him and that was increasingly clear in previous episodes. 

Given all the harrowing experiences characters endure on The Walking Dead, their dealing with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder is not always shown. Most seem to bounce back fairly easily, which may be an effect of living in a constantly traumatic environment but also requires quite a huge suspension of disbelief. Siddiq’s PTSD was at least given some time to play out this season but sadly, as is the fashion on The Walking Dead, it only led to tragedy.

It turns out, not that surprisingly, that Dante was an undercover Whisperer all along. Not only that, he was actually present during Alpha’s massacre of Siddiq’s friends. I’ve had my suspicions about Dante for a while now so this twist did not really come across as shocking. What’s more disturbing is the idea that a Whisperer was able to so easily infiltrate the community and live there undetected for months. Which begs the more intriguing question of how many other spies might Alpha have sent to wreak havoc among her enemies?

Carol continued her campaign against Alpha by interrogating the Whisperer she and Daryl captured last episode. There’s some good cop, bad cop approaches used here, neither of which was effective in getting any information out of him. But Carol discovers that Alpha has made the Whisperers believe that Lydia is dead. Carol decides to use this information against them but in her own ruthlessness, she shows little regard for Lydia’s welfare, a fact that disturbs Daryl.

Aaron continues his reaching out to Gamma, who seems strangely reluctant to fulfill her mission of turning him. When Carol and Lydia later come across Aaron and Gamma, the latter is shocked to see Alpha’s daughter alive and well, and this is a turning point for the heretofore loyal Whisperer. Confronted with proof of Alpha’s duplicity, Gamma might now become a threat to the leader of the Whisperers, but whether or not she will join Aaron and the others remains to be seen.

With only one more episode before the midseason finale of The Walking Dead, we have an interesting contrast between two Whisperers, one a spy who has fulfilled his deadly mission while another loyal agent possibly turned against the mighty Alpha. It’s an intriguing situation and one with enough tension to make us genuinely curious to see how it plays out for the rest of the main characters and how it shifts the power balance among the Whisperers themselves.