Season 8, Episode 1
- Wren has a chance encounter with a prisoner that could change everything.
The eighth, and final, season premiere.
- All for Nothing: Madison painfully points out that she endured seven years of incarceration for nothing since Morgan ultimately surrendered himself and Mo back to PADRE.
- Big Damn Heroes: When Madison is about to be killed by walkers, Grace swoops in and saves her.
- Child Soldier: Madison points out that PADRE has something nefarious planned if they’re training children en masse for combat.
- Continuity Nod:
- Mo notices graffiti left on the wall of the boat left by Morgan, referencing Jenny, Duane, and King County.
- Mo discovers the audio tape of Grace’s singing that she recorded for her in Season 7’s "Sonny Boy".
- Morgan tells Mo how her parents perished years ago - Isaac was bitten by walkers in the sixth season premiere, and Rachel was forced to kill herself after being too grievously injured to save Mo in the sixth season finale.
- Towards the end of the episode, PADRE workers are shown making bullets, as Eugene Porter did for a few seasons of the mothership show before the Coalition largely retired the use of firearms.
- Death Seeker: Played With. Madison starts the episode as this, believing that she was able to help Morgan and Mo escape and that she has earned penance for all her crimes she did for PADRE, thus she feels her life can end in peace. But when she learns that Mo and Morgan rejoined PADRE, she regains the will to live, though she’s still willing to sacrifice her life if it means helping them.
- Despair Event Horizon: When Morgan was trapped with no way out in a swamp with walkers, he called PADRE for help and willingly joined them if it meant keeping Mo alive. Ever since then, he’s been convinced that he could’ve never protected Mo and that PADRE must be obeyed. Grace similarly has been broken and refuses to properly reconnect with her adoptive daughter.
- I Have No Son!: Subverted. Morgan and Grace still mourn losing their daughter to PADRE, and to minimize the pain they try their best to not reconnect with her. By the end, however, Grace admits it hurt to even see her again.
- Insistent Terminology: Morgan continues referring to the masked survivors who confronted him and Madison as the "posse".
- No Infantile Amnesia: Mo is fearful of walkers due to the near-death experience she had shortly after the episode's cold open, and also remembers Grace's recording for her, when these events took place when she was approximately a year old.
- Room Full of Crazy: Morgan’s hideout has a lot of graffiti of his late family in it, showing he suffered a relapse to "clear" Morgan.
- Time Skip: Several years have passed since the end of the previous season, and Mo is now eight years old.
- Villain Protagonist: Morgan is still the lead of the show, but now he is a more or less willing member of PADRE due to believing there’s no other choice.
- What Happened to the Mouse?: Morgan tells Madison that Victor wasn’t with the group on the rafts, and his fate is still unknown.
