Fear the Walking Dead Recap: “Sanctuary”

“Go out there, you make it right.” The words that Daryl Dixon (Norman Reedus) told Dwight (Austin Amelio) on the “Wrath” episode of The Walking Dead season 8 echo in Fear the Walking Dead season 8, which begins with Dwight returning to his old, once-happy home in Virginia without wife Sherry (Christine Evangelista). A framed photo of “D” and “Honey” — right where he left it years earlier — shatters onto the floor. Dwight carves a wooden figure when he’s interrupted by Jay (Jack Mikesell), a straggler claiming he was robbed of something he can’t live without: insulin. Dwight suspects it’s no coincidence. The last time he helped someone get insulin, he ended up in the Sanctuary with half his face burned by Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). No good deed goes unpunished… 

Dwight may have been burned before, but he relents when the man reveals he recently lost his wife and son. “I think you lost somebody, too,” he says. “Maybe it was your wife, maybe it was more than her. If you don’t help me, if we don’t help each other, what are we even doing here?” Dwight decides to sneak into the Sanctuary, steal the medicine, and meet Jay back at the house before the marauders squatting inside the long-abandoned factory know he’s there.

Walkers with melted-down metal “helmets” protecting their brains serve as watchdogs. Dwight infiltrates the Sanctuary and is overcome by memories: stashing cigarettes in his old room, Sherry leaving him a breakup note, a Lucille-wielding Negan at the door. “Who are you, Dwight?” Negan says in voiceover. “There is always a cost.” It is what it is. Dwight rummages through duffle bags and finds the case of insulin, along with an infinity sign he etched onto the furnace. The same furnace where he watched Dr. Emmett Carson be burned alive. As he stares into the flames of the furnace where a scolding-hot iron mutilated his face, Dwight is caught by Phil (T. Ryan Mooney).

The guard decides Dwight needs to be punished for stealing, starting with the other side of his face. But Dwight, almost on instinct, hurls Phil into the flames to be burned alive. More marauders appear and fire at Dwight, shooting him in the shoulder as he flees. Dwight makes it back to his house with the insulin, but it’s too late: Jay died and turned. Dwight puts him down and roars — anger, frustration, and pain all at once. “You should have killed me when you had the chance. I tried to make it right, Daryl. But I guess I couldn’t. You should’ve killed me when you had the chance, Daryl,” Dwight yells. “You should’ve just killed me when you had the chance! Please! Please, come and do it right now! Please!” As a delirious Dwight collapses from his wound, it appears his pleading prayer is answered as a truck pulls up. It’s Sherry, June Dorie (Jenna Elfman), and Dove (Jayla Walton), who have traveled from Georgia to Virginia to bring Dwight back to PADRE.

June — who had her trigger finger removed by Shrike — walks Sherry through stitching up Dwight. He wants them to leave him be, worried that the marauders will kill them if they track him down. But they’re not leaving without him. Sherry reports that Troy Otto (Daniel Sharman) has a score to settle with Madison, and he plans on settling it by taking over PADRE. With Madison M.I.A. and Victor Strand (Colman Domingo) in charge, they need Dwight to win their fight with Troy’s army. 

As Red Kite, Dwight trained every kid on the island, so Sherry and June need him to rally the pint-sized troops. “There’s nothing that I could say or do that you couldn’t do better. I can’t help save those kids. I couldn’t even save my own son,” Dwight says of the zombie-bitten Finch (Gavin Warren). “Every time I try to make something right, someone gets hurt.” That includes Jay, so the best thing they can do for PADRE — and the kids — is to leave Dwight there alone.

Sherry, sick of Dwight’s resignation, tells him she’s not here for him. She came here for their son. And for PADRE. “That place is the reason he’s dead,” Dwight tells her. “Why do you want to fight for that?” Sherry explains that if she fights for PADRE, “Maybe something good can come from something bad. Finch’s life needs to mean something. And helping these kids, helping make PADRE into something better… that is how we honor him.” But Dwight is too depressed to go back there, so he’ll honor their son his own way. “What do you think Finch would say,” Sherry asks, “if he knew his father walked away from kids who needed protection?” But it’s not because Dwight doesn’t care about those kids — it’s because he does.

The next day, it’s discovered Dove took the truck in the night. She returns with a bullet in her side, fired by thieves who tried to steal the truck. Thieves looking for someone that burned their friend. There’s no exit wound, which means June needs to extract the bullet and clean the wound before Dove goes into septic shock. Dwight is unsurprised that the same marauders who took over the Sanctuary attacked Dove, which their leader Marty (Alex Morf) laughs off as “beautiful karma.” Marty offers a trade: if Dwight gives himself over and gives the zombified Phil “the satisfaction of finishing what he started,” they’ll treat Dove at the Sanctuary. Hearing the word “Sanctuary” triggers Sherry, who opens fire on Marty and his merry band of assholes. They’re 20 miles out, so the adults decide they can make it to the Sanctuary and perform Dove’s surgery before Marty’s marauders make it back on foot.

“This is happening all over again. Us, a kid who needs surgery. It never ends,” Dwight recalls of the last time they were all together in the train car. At the Sanctuary, Sherry has her own flashbacks: Negan, being his “wife,” and that goddamn grin of his. Sherry guns down another guard as Dwight watches Phil’s reanimated remains clawing at him from inside the furnace. In the infirmary, June instructs Sherry to inject Dove with 100 milligrams of the lidocaine. Under the circumstances, the best they can do is subcutaneous anesthetic injections around the wound. Dwight tries to convince June to perform the surgery herself, but she asserts: she can’t.

Dove doesn’t want Dwight to be the one to remove the bullet. As she callously reminds him, “He couldn’t even save his own son! I’m not letting him do the same to me!” The Sanctuary rumbles and rattles as walkers flood into a hole in the perimeter fence and press against the walls. The bullet is dangerously close to Dove’s arteries, so one false move or a slip of the hand could be fatal. If they don’t draw the walkers away from the wall, the Sanctuary falls — and Dove dies. Dwight tells Sherry to stay with June while he holds off the walkers, but she figures out that Dwight is going on a suicide mission.

Dwight trying to help Jay “landed us right back here in this hellhole,” Dwight says, pointing out it’s not a coincidence that they’re right back where they started. Dwight drew infinity signs all over when they were living at the Sanctuary, places where Negan couldn’t find them. “It was me and you. Forever,” Dwight explains. “Kept me going. It made me feel like we could turn something bad into something good.” Sherry believes they can. Dwight doesn’t. “We can’t. Not with us,” he says. “And I’m so tired of making people suffer for it.” As for Dwight killing himself, he’s going to clear the walkers so they can save Dove. Maybe Dwight dies, maybe he lives, but he’ll honor Finch. Except he won’t: Sherry calls him selfish and locks him inside his old room. As she puts it: “You don’t get to give up like this.”

Meanwhile, the walkers rattle the walls outside. Creaking metal and crumbling walls makes Dove beg June to do the surgery, but they have to wait for the building to be stable. Pressed for the real reason she’s hesitating, June finally confesses: “Because what happened to them isn’t going to happen to you.” Finch. And Hannah. And Rose, her daughter who died from pneumonia and turned when she went on a three-day search for medicine. June couldn’t save her, just like she couldn’t save Finch. Dove agrees with her: “PADRE was right. You can’t protect me. None of you can protect me!” Dove reveals that she didn’t come to Virginia for Red Kite… she came because she wanted to get as far away from PADRE as possible. She was trying to run away “because people like you are in charge now. People who will just let us down, because that’s what people who can’t get over their own shit do.”

Outside, Sherry clears walkers and radios June to tell her she locked Dwight in his old room. PADRE needs him because the kids will “follow him to the end of the Earth,” so she makes June promise to help Dove and get Dwight back to PADRE. The walkers topple the fence and bring it down on Sherry, pinning her down as more and more pile on top. Before the walkers can fulfill her death wish, she’s saved by Dwight, freed from his room by June. With a gun and an axe, Dwight and Sherry clear walkers and clear their issues: he accuses her of lying about honoring Finch and keeping Dwight alive to fight for PADRE. He suggests she locked him up because she was planning on dying by suicide by walker. And that she doesn’t really believe in what she said about good coming from bad.

“You want to,” Dwight says. “I want to, too. But it can’t.” And if that’s true, then she doesn’t know how to go on living. Dwight and Sherry go on living a little longer as Marty’s men make it back and open fire, just as walkers breach the Sanctuary walls. The building — which was once under seige by a walker horde during all out war with Negan’s Saviors — finally gives way and crumbles, with Dwight, Sherry, June, and Dove surrounded by both the living and the dead. Marty makes his way through the swarming mass of undead and attacks Dwight, making good on his promise to give Phil the satisfaction of eating Dwight. As Marty unlatches the furnace door, Dwight grabs a nearby iron, slams it into Marty’s face… and stands back as the smoldering Zombie Phil sinks his teeth into Marty’s throat.

With the fire extinguished, Dwight gets the group inside the furnace just as the Sanctuary roof collapses. It’s stable enough to perform Dove’s surgery, which Dwight knows June is capable of doing herself. Because Sherry was right. “Maybe something good can come from something bad, and maybe there’s a reason that we all wound up in here,” he realizes. “We just needed each other to see it.” Sherry encourages June to save Dove. Because what happened to her — what happened to all of them — doesn’t have to happen again. They can break the cycle. “Maybe we just needed to work through the bad to get to the good.”

In the end, the Sanctuary has fallen. The furnace survived the collapse, but the walkers crushed beneath concrete and metal did not. Perched atop the wreckage: a Finch. Dove’s surgery was a success, only her name isn’t Dove: it’s Odessa. Dwight wants to turn PADRE into “what it’s supposed to be, the way that Finch wanted it.” And the four of them will do it together, because they’re a family.

Dwight and Sherry take one last look at the destroyed Sanctuary… and they leave it behind.

The episode ends at PADRE, where Victor Strand (Colman Domingo) puts the finishing touches on the basement cell where Madison Clark (Kim Dickens) spent the last seven years behind bars. The cell has been fashioned into a room for Tracy Otto (Antonella Rose), who is blindfolded and escorted inside by two of the Germans who fled the Emissary Suites for PADRE when the hotel was taken over by Troy Otto.

“I’m gonna help you. You’re gonna help me,” Strand tells Tracy. Help you do what? With a smile, Strand answers: “Save PADRE.”

New episodes of Fear the Walking Dead premiere Sundays on AMC and AMC+.

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