AMC’s The Walking Dead: World Beyond
1×07: “Truth or Dare”
Directed by Michael Cudlitz
Written by Eddie Guzelian

* For a recap & review of “Shadow Puppets,” click here.
* For a recap & review of “The Sky is a Graveyard,” click here.
Huck is having nightmares. So she wakes up and gets about her day. Those bad memories are probably one reason she seems to be moving all the time, not wanting to stop long enough for them to catch up with her. Everybody in the post-zombie apocalypse world has that kind of existence, no one’s been left untouched by tragedy. We see Huck out scavenging, finding a walker with a duffel full of usable items. At one point she hears a big truck coming down the road only to see it’s Felix and the others.

The crew keep on moving until they reach a place to hole up a while. Elton’s busy marvelling at Tony and his magic skills while Iris is clearly falling for Percy and Silas looks on, wishing it was him she was falling for instead of the new guy. Huck scavenged a bottle of Mountain Dew for her pal Felix, a big fan of the disgusting neon liquid. Everybody’s able to relax, for a time. Later on they take a look at a Civic Republic military map. Tony points out that, to the naked eye, the map’s useless. But with light and some of the coloured filters found in the truck, the map actually reveals a bunch of hidden “fuel caches.” Hot damn, kids!
We get a glimpse of Huck’s past. We see her out drinking with Marine friends, playing darts with a blindfold over her eyes. She and her military buddies were having fun together. She and one guy, Drake (Gil Perez-Abraham), clearly had something more than friendship together, even if he seemed resistant to talking about it. At the bar, they saw news reports about what was certainly a rapidly deteriorating crisis with the zombie virus.

Iris and Percy have been checking the maps further. They were able to figure out the likely location of her father. Ithaca, New York is where the crew are going to go, giving Felix a definitive destination that sets Tony at ease with their arrangement. Everyone does their best to have a relaxing evening, at least as relaxed as they can be in their world. The kids hang out like everything’s normal, and this initiates a game of Truth or Dare. Oh, my. Never a good idea. “What‘s the worst thing you‘ve ever done?” pushes Hope a bit too far when Percy won’t give up asking, over and over. She walks out angry, so Elton follows after her. He gives her a drunken hug before she leaves.

Drake, Huck, and other Marines were being sent into “city service tunnels” to find civilians and get them back to safety, as well as take out any “hostile targets.” They didn’t know the nature of the threat at that point, so different theories were flying around. The Marines first came upon zombies, not knowing what it was they were dealing with, and things only got worse from there. A great, scary sequence here as Huck figures out, using thermal vision, that the walkers have lower body temperatures, allowing them to suss out what to shoot and who to save.
That night, Hope admits to killing somebody “the night the sky fell,” telling Huck about it. She explains what happened with her mom being shot. She also admits it was Elton’s pregnant mother. Huck tells the girl it wasn’t her fault. She likewise says “We can‘t change the things we‘ve done,” we can only try to reduce the damage of our actions, and there’s always some light after the darkness is over.
The gang get to one of the marked caches on the map. Should be easy after getting inside, given the Civic Republic keep things locked down well and would’ve already cleared these places of the undead. We’re given another flashback to Huck and the Marines. They were being directed to kill anybody on two feet, “living or dead.” It’s no wonder that present day Huck feels so strongly about having to live with one’s choices, particularly those immoral choices we make at certain times when there may be no other choice to make if we’re trying to survive.
As the crew check around the cache location, Hope’s grabbed and held at gunpoint by a man called Walter. Huck does what she can to talk sense with the guy, but he’s pretty loco, believing they’re with the Civic Republic. He’s injured bad from a bite, too. Huck convinces Walter to put the gun on her and he lets Hope go. All the while she can’t shake her Marine past, as she and her platoon were being instructed to kill men, women, children, and walkers alike or else be court-martialed. Instead of following sick orders, Huck turned her gun on the other Marines, including Drake. And right now, she has to do what needs doing to keep surviving again.

They’ve got supplies, and maybe more Civic Republic info to help them—encrypted data that could be of use, if they’re able to crack the code. Percy and Tony have decided to keep with the others, hoping to help them get to the girls’ father after all’s said and done. This is good, even if Silas is overly jealous of Percy giving all kinds of attention to Iris. Things only get harder for Hope as she and Elton get closer each day; it’ll be so much tougher for her to tell him the truth if she eventually decides to say anything. Sad to see his hope that his mother’s alive when we know she’s very much dead and gone, along with his unborn baby sister. Hope thinks it’s too late to tell Elton, it’d only crush him completely. Huck thinks it’s good she kept a keepsake from that awful night, just as she did with her scar she put on her own face to remember Drake. That’s one way “to remember the bad you‘ve done,” and a reminder to keep on living in the name of doing good.

When Percy doesn’t meet up with Iris later she goes looking for him. She stumbles onto Tony’s dead, mutilated body, and Silas’s big wrench is laying on the ground. An absolutely vicious scene. Percy’s nowhere to be found, and they discover Silas in a closet, near catatonic.
So what’s happened?
Whoa! An unexpected ending.
I’ve been waiting for Silas to snap. Or, for someone to use his past against him. Could Percy have done this to implicate the big guy? Why would he do that? Hmm. We shall see in the next chapter.