I"m sorry I missed last week's episode called "What Happened and What's Going On," but I was under the weather. I will say that I pretty much disliked it all the way around. Killing Tyreese the first episode back after killing off Beth seemed wasted to me and the 1980's Tangerine Dream horror music vibe didn't really work either. Anyway, enough about last week.
This week the group finally gets to try and deal with their grief of losing Beth and Tyreese. In the zombie apocalypse, there's never much time to sit back and process feelings of loss because loss is inevitable. You have to keep moving to survive, but the show had to deal with the issues caused by killing off two main characters so close to one another.
The backdrop for their sorrow to play out is their downtrodden trek out of Atlanta. They are out of gas and trudging across a roadway, starving, no food, water and energy as they try and travel sixty miles to DC. The heat and exhaustion played well, but the function of the episode was to take a step back and process what had happened without inflicting more carnage on our group. Too much of the dialogue was centered around some characters telling others that they will and they must survive. Part of the problem was that there wasn't much going on so they needed to say something I guess.
The hardest hit members by recent events are Sasha, Maggie and Daryl. And all their actions tonight were a direct result of their suffering.
Sasha has a death wish and wants to kill everything that moves, She even screws up a killin' party Rick organized to eliminate a swarm of zombies that had been following them by breaking ranks and instead of leading zombies off an embankment, she started chopping and cutting away which put everyone in danger.
Lauren Cohen is in fine form this episode (Maggie) who's either sitting or walking in a shocked stupor until she rips into Father Gabriel, who tried to comfort her. I guess he forgot that he left his entire congregation to die while he hid behind the walls of his church, but she didn't and told him as much. later in the episode he seemed to heed her words and he burnt his white collar.
Daryl is constantly walking off the road by himself making believe he's looking for supplies, but he's really trying to be alone. Carol follows him as she usually does and pushes him to deal with his feeling over the loss of Beth and to keep surviving. She looks more beautiful each episode even as they struggle to come to grips with what's happened. Daryl wanders off again and comes across a barn. He sits down against a tree and lights up a stoggie. After taking a few puffs, he takes the lighted edge and burns his hand deeply, like a teenager using a razor to cut themselves. Not registering the pain, he begins to sob uncontrollably.
The group is stunned to find a a cache of water left for them in the road by an anonymous donor with a note that says, from "A friend. Rick is very apprehensive about this gift as he should be. Eugene, who's come out of his head trama, grabs a bottle and starts guzzling it down when Abraham slaps it out of his hand. Rick tells them that it's going to rain some time soon and low and behold, the heavens open up and the clouds cry upon them. But it's not just a shower, it's a real storm so Daryl leads them back to the barn for shelter.
They are huddled around each other out of the rain and Rick tells a story about how his grandfather survived in WWII.
After a few years of pretending he was dead, he made it out alive and that the trick of it I think. We do what we need to do and then we get to live no matter what we find in DC. I know we will be OK because this is how we survive. We tell ourselves that we are the walking dead.
OK, was this a tacky use of the title of the show? Daryl disagrees that they are the same as walkers and when Rick tries to explain, he leaves.
At first I thought Maggie had awoken from a nightmare about walkers storming the barn in the torrential downpour and it takes everyone to defeat them and then she wakes up to see that everything is peaceful. But other viewers may say it was a real scene and they did beat back the dead ones until they were totally exhausted and I was probably wrong in my initial impression.
Daryl has fixed a broken music box that Carl had given Maggie earlier and she gladly takes it. She then escorts Sasha outside to watch the sunrise come up to lighten her mood when she opens up the music box, it seems broken still. Sasha doesn't think she can make it any longer. Suddenly a clean young man named Aaron approaches them and says they have nothing to fear from him, he wants to talk to their leader, I believe his name is Rick. Suddenly the music box plays its tune.
* It's been interesting watching Michonne's character develop. When she first showed up she was a sword wielding momma who didn't trust anybody except Andrea and her blade, but now she's been acting like the voice of reason - trying to pump up the group's morale to survive.
* Seeing baby Judith sleeping in the barn was kind of frightening for me. I don't know how she's survived so far. it seems like three years have passed, but in their time she hasn't aged much.
(Please excuse all typos and errors since I'm trying to watch SNL40 at the same time)
