Spoilers below for anyone who hasn't yet watched The Walking Dead's latest episode, "Do Not Send Us Astray."
Since the days of Carl failing to stay inside the house, The Walking Dead has sometimes seemed infatuated with giving viewers one insanely dreadful child character after another, with very few exceptions. Season 8 has given rise to the latest of these underage disappointments, Henry, who has proven himself to be as efficient as a cotton candy umbrella, both in trying to avenge his brother's death and in keeping the HIlltop's Saviors penned up. What's more, his actions back in "Honor" have given Morgan regret-centered hallucinations. And now the kid's missing? Damn it to hell, Henry, you are the worst.
I'll start by saying I understand Henry doesn't really have a life in this world, and that his brother Benjamin was everything to him, which means avenging that death is the kid's entire narrative. However, his way of going about it went completely against logic and order, so there can only be a minimal amount of sympathy mustered up in the aftermath of his foolish actions. After it was made clear that neither Carol nor Ezekiel wanted Henry to have a gun, the imp went ahead and secured himself one, aiming to visit the pen of Saviors for an after-hours execution. But instead of handling things from outside the enclosure, where he could very easily aim at and shoot anyone through the many, many gaps, Henry unlocked it and went inside, where he expectedly failed to provoke any confessions. Ugh.
Of the millions of ways this situation could have gone wrong, viewers watched as one captured Savior, an accidental victim of one of those gore-tainted weapons, went full-on walker and starting chomping. In the ensuing havoc, Henry panicked and got handled by Jared, the very person that deserved to get blasted to smithereens. (I bet when Jared was young, he was worse than all of The Walking Dead's kid characters put together.) So now, there are a small group of Saviors out there with a big gun and the urge to take down both Maggie, who held them prisoner to begin with, and Simon, who declared them all to be expendable in the attack. That situation can only end in more deaths, right?
As we've seen, Morgan is being haunted by a bloodied vision of Gavin, who drives it home that Morgan should have been the one to kill him, and not Henry. (Of any non-Saviors, I'm sure the real Gavin would have preferred "no one" killed him.) Morgan is now overly worried about having dashed any remaining innocence within the insanely stubborn child, and it's weighing on him in big ways, and some that likely have him drawing connections to his own son Duane, similar to the way he did with Benjamin. If Henry's downfall is the issue that ends up causing Morgan to go on his crossover road trip into the Fear the Walking Dead universe, then that's probably the only silver lining to be found here.
At this point, I want Henry to succeed just to avoid any other FUBAR attempts to serve justice, and without having any other characters put themselves in peril over looking for him. (Sophia-influenced groans echo through our heads.) And then I want him to go away. Not like, back to The Kingdom or anything. But like, away away. Who's with me?
With next week's episode hopefully bringing about Henry going through a Homer Simpson-esque throttling, The Walking Dead airs Sunday nights on AMC at 9:00 p.m. ET. To see what other shows are populating the TV-scape, head to our midseason premiere schedule.
