Welcome back to The Walking Dead! I don't know why it took me so long to get this recap up because there's hardly anything to recap. Seriously. This show has been on break since the end of November when we were left with Beth's brutal death and on its highly anticipated* return ... we get about five minutes of plot and a bunch of art shots.
We join Rick, Glen, Tyrese, Michonne and Noah in a car, heading for Noah's home in Virginia. In the wake of Beth's death, they are lost, disconsolate, without a plan; Beth had planned to get Noah back home to his family so that 's what they all decided to do. This car is front-running while the rest of the crew are somewhere further back - Rick's group is going to go in first to scout it out before bringing the rest in. Noah is convinced that his mom and twin little brothers will be fine, living in their gated community. Everyone else is grimly hopeful or just grim. When they get to the neighborhood, the gates are locked but when Glen climbs up and peeks over, the place is burned out and deserted. They all go in and Noah falls to his knees, looking at the pieces of dead bodies strewn around the cul de sac and all the ruined homes. As he sobs and shudders, Rick, Glen and Michonne decide to scout around for anything useful. Tyrese says he'll keep an eye on Noah since there are a few walkers lurching around and the group splits.
Rick, Glen and Michonne find a few things that they can use - a clean shirt, a baseball bat - and the subject of Beth comes up. Both Rick and Glen are all, even if Darryl hadn't killed that Dawn chick, we would have. Michonne gives them the stinkeye and says that she's worried that they've been out on their own too long. She wants to find a safe (safe-ish) place and hunker down, build a community, reclaim their humanity. They think about this neighborhood as a possibility but when they go to the back wall, they realize that the place had been breached by humans first, walkers second, and maybe this is not the place. Then Michonne suggests that even though Eugene lied about a cure being in D.C., maybe he was right about there being people in D.C. They are only about one hundred miles away at this point and since no one else has any better ideas, Rick decides that they should try D.C.
Meanwhile, Noah has pulled himself together enough to want to go see what happened to his house. Tyrese isn't sure this is a good idea but follows along to keep the kid out of trouble. When they get there, Noah's mom is dead and decayed on the living room floor. To give Noah some space to say goodbye, Tyrese checks out the rest of the house. He finds one of the little brothers dead and decaying on his bed but forgets the whole TWINS thing and the other twin, now a zombie, sneaks up and takes a big chunk out of his forearm. Oops. Noah runs in and offs his zombie brother and then runs for help. Tyrese cowers in the bedroom, blood gushing from his arm. It takes Noah a ridiculously long time to find the others and while he's gone, Tyrese hallucinates a whole bunch of other dead characters - Beth, Bob, the Governor, Mika and Lizzie, that Terminus asshole who Tyrese failed to kill when he had the chance - talking to him and either telling him that it's okay to let go or that he fucked up and is now getting what's coming to him. When Rick et als. get there, they chop off his bitten arm and hustle him back to their car. As they drive to rejoin the rest of the group, a barely conscious Tyrese hallucinates all his dead friends again and then dies, head against the car window. They rejoin the rest of the group and bury Tyrese, Gabriel saying some words over the grave.
And that's what happened. That's it. This episode was filmed quite nicely, with a lot of striking, almost abstract shots. And the scenes with Tyrese post-bite are feverish and disjointed, kind of artsy. But that's it. I guess it's good that as nice a character as Tyrese got nearly a whole episode to himself to say goodbye to the show but I was sort of underwhelmed by the whole thing. In hindsight, my reaction was quite possibly related to the 100% lack of Darryl in the episode.
Previously on The Walking Dead / next time on The Walking Dead
* I'm sure some people were highly anticipating it coming back. I wouldn't count myself among them. Yes, looking forward to seeing what comes next, but it's not like I was counting the days or anything.
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4 hours ago
I pretty much fast-forwarded all the post-bite dead people on parade bits. It's a cliche at this point and since he died, what difference did it make in the narrative of the show? It seemed like a too bad your contract negotiations failed thing.
ReplyDeleteExactly. And I sort of thought it cheapened Beth's and the little girls' deaths, seeing them again like that. All three of those deaths were pretty powerful and they should have let them lie in peace.
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