The Walking Dead: Rick Grimes Beyond Thunderdome
After piling on the misery during the second half The Walking Dead's sixth season and first half of the seventh as Grimes and his crew descended into a Saviors-induced hell where everything was wrong, Season 7's second half is finding them digging their way out.
Rick's deal with the taciturn junkyard scavengers in "New Best Friends" is the most significant progress the Alexandrians have made in anything besides gathering canned goods since they met Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan)
Not coincidentally, this is the most straight-up fun episode since the second episode of Season 6B, which introduced Jesus (Tom Payne) and featured an almost slapstick fight between him and Rick and Daryl (Norman Reedus).
Between the junkyarders' inexplicably stunted vocabulary and goth-punk wardrobe, the cheesy greenscreen that showed the junkyard stretching out all the way to the horizon and Rick's mano-a-mano cage match with a homemade melee weapon of a walker, this episode was absurd in all the right ways.
The action took place in two locations, the still-unnamed junkyard and the Kingdom, so let's break it down by location.
Rick and his crew are surrounded by the junkyard gang (Andrew Lincoln calls them "Kraftwerk," after the robotic Teutonic electro band, so that's what we'll call them for now, too).
"No," she says, and a fight breaks out.
The leader allows Gabriel to plead his case for joining if he lets Tamiel go, saying "Your words now," and Gabriel says that they can have whatever they want of the Saviors' vast amount of stuff if they help.
Soon they're up up up at the top of a huge hill of trash, surveying the dump kingdom.
Greg Nicotero and Gino Crognale, the makeup artist who plays this walker, are sick puppies.
During the fight, Rick impales his hand on one of the spikes, so hopefully somebody can hook him up with a tetanus shot.
Rick realizes that these folks are ruthless scavengers -- they were waiting for someone else