Summary
While “What’s Been Lost” contains a couple of significant moments and one welcome major character death, it’s hard to argue that this is the final season firing on all cylinders.
This The Walking Dead season 11, episode 20 recap for the episode titled “What’s Been Lost” contains spoilers.
Two things of particular significance happen in “What’s Been Lost”. The first is one character who has been neglected throughout the entire final season finally takes a stand, and the other is a character who has probably been given a little too much attention finally meets their end. Between these things are the usual shenanigans; overwritten Eugene dialogue, Daryl badassery, and so on, and so forth.
The Walking Dead season 11, episode 20 recap
The idea is that, after The Walking Dead season 11, episode 19, Pamela Milton has ordered everyone even loosely associated with Eugene to be taken into custody. Her plan is to use their capture to force Yumiko to sentence Eugene in a kangaroo court in order to quell public unrest and cement Pamela once again at the top of the Commonwealth’s hierarchy.
The problem is that neither Carol nor Daryl are captured, and considering they’re easily the most reliable and effective of the core cast, that means Pamela can’t even get the ball rolling on her scheme. They kill a few guards, and ultimately decide to break Hornsby out of prison so that he can help them find their friends and free them so that Pamela can’t use them as leverage.
Hornsby has, quite clearly, outlived his usefulness to the show’s drama. When Daryl and Carol first find him, it seems he has been driven somewhat mad by having had to feed parts of one of his associates to a zombified Sebastian Milton, but Carol slaps some sense back into him and the script promptly forgets all about it. Hornsby is almost immediately back to his usual self, trying to manipulate Carol into saving the Commonwealth and appointing him as its de facto leader almost the second that the two of them end up being separated from Daryl.
The separation thing is pointless. Daryl hangs back to fight off some soldiers so that Carol can get Hornsby out of there, and then he disappears for the rest of the episode until he reappears at just the right moment, with no real explanation for how he got out of the predicament he was in. Hornsby’s attempts at silver-tonguing Carol are pointless too since she doesn’t buy anything he says for a single second, and a sequence in which a walker’s entire face sloughs off is kinda fun but is clearly there because there’s nothing substantive to put in its place.
What’s happening here is that we’re delaying Hornsby’s death. Eventually, he lets slip about a train, meaning he has nothing else to offer, so Daryl and Carol let him go, perhaps against their better judgment. Naturally, he tries to grab a rifle out of a nearby truck and turn it on his captors, so Carol looses an arrow directly into his neck, killing him. It’s about time, really.
Elsewhere, Pamela continues to threaten Yumiko into reciting a pre-written speech condemning Eugene and extolling the virtues of the Commonwealth and the Milton family, and Yumiko continues to push back against it. What this amounts to is basically a complete redo of the scene where Sebastian got finessed by Eugene and Max, only this time when Yumiko goes off-script, there’s no recorded message or riot to distract from what she’s saying. Yumiko intends to defend Eugene in court.
Now, I’ve been doing this a long time and am thus deeply cynical, but it can’t just be me that thinks this makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, can it? How does Yumiko possibly imagine this will work? Pamela will not allow a fair trial. Will there be a jury? And even if that’s the case, are we really expected to believe that Pamela would just accept a democratic verdict from people she has been expressly manipulating, lying to, and sometimes killing this entire time? I just cannot fathom how any of this is going to work.
Anyway, in the final scene, we see many passengers being ferried away in a convoy of jeeps, with someone – who we see is Ezekiel – being syringed in the neck. Looks like we’re getting a breakout in the next episode, so that should be fun.
