The Walking Dead S2E8 "Nebraska" (2/12/12)

Welcome back to The Walking Dead!  Tonight's theme will be hope, to have or have not.

We pick right up where we left off, with Rick putting a bullet through Zombie Sophia's head.  Carol breaks away from Darryl's arms and runs off.  Everyone else is stunned.  Herschel's stepdaughter Beth runs to her mother's corpse, sobbing.  The zombie is not quite dead, however, and attacks Beth.  Rick's people spring into action, pulling the girl away to safety and Andrea finally putting a pickaxe through the zombie's skull.  As Herschel and his people head back to the farmhouse, Shane gets riled up about how they've been searching for Sophia when she was in the barn the whole time.  Herschel protests that he didn't know she was in there and tells Rick that he's got to get his people off this farm.  Rick lays into Shane, telling him that he'd been handling things but Shane scoffs, saying that Rick had them all out searching for a little girl whom they knew in their hearts was dead.  "You're just as delusional as Herschel."  Shane has a point but I also think he's over compensating for not having been able to put Sophia down himself.

Darryl finds Carol hiding out in the RV.  He sits there with her, not saying a word.Glen follows Maggie into the house, asking again if she knew Sophia had been in the barn.  She just stares at him.  He thinks that now that they've found her, even though she's dead, maybe they can move on.  Maggie wonders how people can just move on.  Outside, Laurie decides that they should dig graves for Sophia, Herschel's wife and his stepson; they'll burn the rest of the bodies.  As the others move off to start digging, Rick whinges about how he's supposed to be taking care of people but they keep getting hurt.  After the graves have been dug, Laurie goes to fetch Carol for the burial service.  Carol doesn't want to go: "That's not my little girl, that's some other ... thing."  Darryl stares at her, then heads to the gravesites.  Inside the house, Herschel packs up his dead wife's things.  He'd been holding onto them in the vain hopes that she'd get better.  He finds a flask in a drawer and stares at it.  We don't see the burial service - just an overhead shot of the group dispersing afterwards, everyone seeming lost and alone.

Carol wanders out into the fields and starts ripping up all the Cherokee roses she can find.  Andrea and T-Dog load up the dead zombies to take them out to burn.  There's a small spat about what just happened: Andrea and T-Dog are on the "damn right we should kill the walkers in our backyard" side of things; Rick, Laurie and Dale think that things might have been handled better.  Maggie asks Glen if he'd consider staying on the farm with him if his group leaves, but before they can get into it, Beth faints in the kitchen.  She is catatonic, feverish, in shock.  No one can find Herschel and it is determined that he's off the farm.  They find the flask and Maggie says that he'd never allow booze on the farm.  Looks like he's rediscovered its charms.  Glen and Rick decide to go to town to check the bar.  Laurie doesn't want Rick to go, saying he needs to stay and be a father; Shane doesn't think they need to do anything to aid Herschel; Rick says he owes it to the man to see that he's safe.

Shane sees Carol come staggering out of the woods, half in shock herself and covered in thorns.  He helps her clean up at the pump, telling her how sorry he is about Sophia.  Meanwhile, Dale tells Laurie his theory about Shane having sacrificed Otis to escape the zombies.  "He's dangerous, Laurie, sooner or later he's gonna kill somebody else."  Beth is not getting any better and Laurie decides to ask Darryl to run into town and fetch back Herschel and Rick - which makes no sense seeing how Rick was planning on bringing the old veterinarian back as soon as he found him.  Darryl calls her Olive Oyl (heh) and tells her to piss off and go after them herself.  He's done looking for people.  I love Darryl.

Blah blah blah on the drive into town, Glen babbles to Rick about how Maggie said she loves him but he didn't say it back.  Ugh, just get into town already and DO something.  When they get to town, they do find Herschel at the bar, working his way through a bottle of whiskey.  They tell him about Beth but he's like, what can I do?  He is feeling sorry for himself, saying that he was a fool and Rick's people saw through that immediately.  "My daughters deserve better than that."

That goddamn Laurie takes a car and drives towards town.  While she's looking at a map (there's like one road out there, what does she need a map for?), a zombie wanders into the road.  She sees it too late and instead of just running it down, clips it and overcorrects, sending the car rolling up and over and into a ditch. What an effing dumbass.

Now Herschel rails at Rick, saying that he did the Christian thing by taking Rick's people in, and they destroyed everything.  Then he switches tacks and rants about how he had been delusional, thinking there was a cure, thinking that there was hope.  "You know that now, don't you?" he says, "There's no hope for any of us."  Rick snaps back that death has always been here for all of them - cancer, heart attacks, now walkers.  "It isn't about what we believe [meaning, yes, he's feeling bereft too], its about them."  Then the door to the street opens and two strangers walk in.  "Sonofabitch, they're alive!" one of them says.

The strangers are Dave (Rene from True Blood) and Tony, recently from Philadelphia.  They've been following rumors around the country and burst Rick's bubble when they tell him that they met a soldier from Fort Benning who said the base was overrun with "lamebrains."  They've been considering Nebraska: low population and lots of guns.  Then, Dave and Tony start asking pointed questions about where Rick, Herschel and Glen are staying, how many survivors are with them, etc.  They invite themselves and their group of people to join our gang out at the farm, saying that there's safety in numbers.  Rick and Herschel present a united front, saying that they can't take any more people in.  Tony is coarse and crude, Dave smoother.  I don't trust him.  He says that his group has gone through a lot, done things they shouldn't have had to - "we can't stay out there, you know what it's like."  Rick demurs: "the farm is too crowded, you'll have to keep looking."  Heh, grunts Dave, and lunges for his gun.  Rick drops him with one shot to the head (so much for Rene from True Blood) and then turns and puts three bullets in Tony.

The music swells up and we cut between Shane and T-Dog lighting the zombie bonfire and Herschel and Glen just staring open-mouthed at Rick.

Previously on The Walking Dead / next time on The Walking Dead