The Walking Dead season 11 episode 6 recap: About those ferals…

The zombie apocalypse is terrifying enough. The Walking Dead season 11 episode 6 managed to turn the heat up on the horror dial, and then some, as Connie (Lauren Ridloff) made her grand return to the series after being largely absent since the start of season 10.

Ridloff, who was off filming Marvel’s Eternals for a large portion of season 10, was thought by characters on the show to have been trapped in the cave full of Alpha’s walker horde in the season 10 midseason premiere. Later, fans learned that she was not only alive, but she found herself in the company of Virgil (Kevin Carroll), the last person to see Michonne before she left to look for Rick in season 9.

“On the Inside”, written by Kevin Deiboldt and directed by TWD special effects guru Greg Nicotero, is as much a haunted house story as it is a story set in the middle of the zombie apocalypse, but when you add Connie’s deafness into the mix it becomes something unlike anything fans have seen on the show – and dare I say on television as a whole – and it’s breathtaking. And utterly horrifying.

Where did the feral people come from on The Walking Dead 1106?

The setup for the story is simple: Connie and Virgil are being chased – or herded – toward a big house in the middle of nowhere. (Side note…where is this house and how has no one from Alexandria been there yet??)

Once inside the house, Virgil thinks they’re safe but Connie isn’t so sure. When she starts searching the rooms she discovers that someone is watching her from inside the wall…and that’s when the story really begins.

As it happens, the terrors in the walls aren’t walkers at all, rather they’re people who have devolved to the point that they’re essentially feral.

How on earth did these people become feral so quickly?

Keeping track of how long the apocalypse has been raging is no easy feat, but if you figure Judith is about ten years old then it has been at least a decade and that means that somehow these creepy-crawly people who move on all-fours slid backwards so quickly on the evolutionary slide that they’re not really people anymore. They’re much more similar to the walkers if anything.

So where did these people come from? How is this the first they’ve been spotted? It took Kelly about a day (give or take) to reach her sister from Alexandria, which means these feral people have been fairly close by this entire time. Who the heck are they, and (perhaps most importantly), who were they to begin with? Are there more of them out there?

“On the Inside” also featured Kelly’s (Angel Theory) quest to find her sister, with help from Carol (Melissa McBride), Magna (Nadia Hilker) and Rosita (Christian Serratos). Daryl (Norman Reedus) was put to the test by the Reapers after being sent on a mission to hunt the people who are trying to steal the Reapers’ supplies. Unfortunately, the people he’s tracking are his friends and he has to do some quick thinking to protect them.

With Connie back on The Walking Dead, the door closes on one mystery (whether Connie had survived the cave-in) but opens the door on another interesting possibility: Virgil knows that Michonne left to find Rick, but Judith (Cailey Fleming) never told anyone that she was looking for Rick at all, opting to tell people that her mom was looking for help and supplies. If Virgil reveals Michonne’s true mission, it could change the trajectory of the final season of the series.

The Walking Dead airs Sundays at 9/8c on AMC, and new episodes are also available to AMC+ subscribers one week early.