I figured that Gabriel is raising an army. The food is his fishes and loaves - he’s using the prospect of food to attract stragglers and turn them into followers, with the obvious biblical allusions. He is going to present the. To Rick to help overthrow the Saviours.
That’s what I get for being a heathen.
That is just what they need, Gabriel with a Christ complex.
Oye!
Those people did seem to be in a pretty pathetic state.
And how crazy is it that they don’t have anyone guarding the food, after what has happened in the past. Gabriel could have waked up the dead with the racket he made getting all that food together and into the vehicle.
Who is taking care of the baby while Gabriel is out playing loaves and fishes?
After getting disillusioned with the show due to the first few episodes of this season, I’ve recently been catching up, happy to discover that things have taken a turn for the dramatically (in more than one sense of the word) better.
But as for Neegan, my working theory has been for a while now that he’s actually just massively suicidal, but for some reason can’t bring himself to off himself. So he just tries his darndest to get somebody to do it for him, escalating to pulling ever more outrageous stunts. However, to his surprise, he just seems to get away with it every time, even starting to build up a following—I mean, nobody would pull this sort of shit if they didn’t have a plan, right?
So people agglomerate around him, and he proceeds to try and alienate, intimidate, and antagonize them into finally just offing him. But again, it has the opposite effect: he’s seen as running a tight ship, even if he’s also unpredictable and unstable. But it’s the zombie apocalypse, and he’s got more nerve than anyone around—simply because he’s just actually, honestly trying to get killed. So people stay.
Then he proceeds to try and get others to kill him. Establishing a reign of terror he knows nobody would put up with under any ordinary circumstances; but it’s the zombie apocalypse, people believe nobody could’ve survived to this point if he didn’t have some trick up his sleeve when he’s parading in front of armed people with nothing but a baseball bat. Surely, they think, if it was actually possible to get rid of him that easily, he’d long be a goner.
So his empire grows; and consequently, his outrageousness further escalates. And that’s the point our plucky heroes enter the story: a massively suicidal dictator-by-accident, who simply gets away with everything now because he’s gotten away with it before, and people just implicitly assume there must be some reason for that.
Hell, things even are at the point where the most secure way to ensure your own survival under Neegan is to try and kill him!
I think (although the majority of people in this thread probably know better by now) Rick’s smile was because he knows two things: first, if those people wanted him dead, he’d be dead—they had them surrounded; no use coming out in the open and revealing themselves. If they’d wanted to shoot them, they’d shot them.
Second, they have guns. Rick needs guns, and they don’t seem to want to kill Rick. So one way or another, he figures, those guns will end up his guns eventually.