Someone approaches the inside of the prison fence to feed the walkers gathered outside the fence. Tyreese and Karen have an intimate moment. Karen goes to the showers by flashlight, and unbeknownst to her is followed back to cell block D by Walker Patrick, who digs in and eats an unknown man sleeping in a cell. Intro music begins to play.
- Sooz: This is not a surprise, we’ve already seen the sneak peeks for the person approaching the fence and knew Patrick was lying there in wait.
- Gen: The whole scene with Karen in the dark hallways reminded me of one of those classic creepy horror movies.
Patrick digs into the now dead man. Rick gets Carl out of bed for the day’s chores while cell block D awakens, bringing Walker Patrick out looking for a new victim. Flash to Gleggie up in the tower, waking up ready to take on the morning’s rounds. Rick and Carl have a conversation with Michonne who’s leaving on another run, before going out to tend to the pigs in the (still burning off) morning fog. Carl wants his gun back, and it’s made clear that he has lost the psychotic “Shanesque” outlook he displayed at the end of Season 3, just before gun shots are heard coming from inside the prison.
They call Michonne back into the yard (who has just ridden out of the gate on her horse), and Maggie and Carl help her past the walkers there while Rick and Glenn run in to help the situation inside. Michonne injures her leg and Carl and Maggie help her back up to the prison. Back inside, the crew kill the new walkers and evacuate while Carol tries to save a man until she realizes he’s been bitten in the neck. Rick, Daryl, and Glenn clear the cell block but find Patrick in the process.
- Sooz: Now we know why there are so many pics of Michonne getting help walking! Carol was ready and waiting to cut off the man’s arm which seems to elude toward the idea that it is HER who is now struggling with a hyper-killer instinct this season, not Carl. I feel like a good part of this episode was used in the Season 4 “sneak peeks” and trailers, so we’ve had a lot of this spoiled for us by AMC themselves. Michonne limping, Glenn yelling “There’s Walkers in D!”, hearing shots from inside the prison, and Daryl scooping up the kid while shooting a walker in the head all came from this one.
- Gen: They didn’t waste any time getting into it in this episode! Right off the bat we’ve got chaos. I think we all saw it coming but it seems like they may have stepped up the gore factor a bit since last season. Loved the walker who rolls out of bed and his guts fall out! Bravo Nicotero!
Rick, Daryl, and Glenn go cell-by-cell to find anyone who’s been attacked and dead, putting the ones they find down before they can turn. Carol decides that the dying man she’s trying to help should say goodbye to his two young daughters. The group clearing the cellblock find a man who died without getting attacked and determine that there’s a virus infecting people, and that they’ve all been exposed. Carol allows the young girls to decide if they want to put down their father after he dies, but they don’t have the nerve and Carol does it for them.
Carl, Michonne, and Maggie hobble up to the prison as Rick comes out and warns them of an illness … telling them not to get too close. Flash to a council meeting in the library with Sasha, Carol, Daryl, Hershel, and Glenn. They talk about what they need to do to isolate the outbreak, but hear Karen out in the hall coughing. They put her in isolation instead of letting Tyreese take her back to his cell. Karen names an unknown character “David” as also showing signs of being sick. Daryl goes off to bury the dead, but is warned to wear gloves and a facemask.
- Sooz: Now we know where the pics of Norman’s face bandanna came from! Honestly there’s been enough spoiler chatting about there being an infectious disease coming around that makes this almost an expected thing. After all, modern medicine is all but dead, vaccines are a thing of the past in this world. And it’s dirty… oh so dirty. What I’m pretty aggravated about is that half of the security about living in a prison comes from the peace of mind of sleeping behind a locked cell door, but they left them all open and therefore got mauled.
- Gen: They dropped a few bread crumbs in the first episode as well, like the only person Daryl said good morning back to at breakfast was…..yup, a doctor. They didn’t give us that little tidbit of info for the good of our health (no pun intended)! We had many a discussion in the chat room this summer about what would happen if people at the prison started becoming ill and dying and it just seemed like common sense to lock yourself in your cell at night, or at least shut the door tight enough so a mindless walker couldn’t escape or enter. Also there is the factor of the new people that they may not have known so well. How could they know if they could really be trusted? Wouldn’t they have felt safer locking themselves in at night? They may have gotten a bit too comfortable over the winter.
Carol approaches the young daughters of the now dead man by the fence. She confronts the elder daughter about not being strong enough to put down her father before he turned, to which the younger daughter says “she’s messed up, she’s not weak”.
Flash to Rick approaching Daryl who’s digging graves. They talk about the “break” Rick has taken as the “leader”. Maggie interrupts bringing attention to a section of the fence that is about to give because of the walker horde that is pushing in on it.Back to Michonne inside with Beth wrapping her injured leg, Judith begins to scream a very desperate, odd cry that makes Michonne wince. Flash back to the fence. The group realizes that someone’s been feeding the walkers from inside the fence just as it begins to give.
- Sooz: Alright, well, Carol’s pendulum has swung WAY too far in the other direction. Can this woman spend more than one season with any sort of dignity or is this it for her? Michonne is acting like she’s lost a baby in the “pre-turn” life. And whomever has been feeding those walkers needs to be lit on fire. It is eluded (by that horrible cry) to that Judith might be sick, which means we can probably expect her to go within the next couple of episodes. I feel like the episode would’ve had more emotional resonance if they had gone ahead and had her fall very ill before the end and let the episode’s cliffhanger be whether she survives or not.
- Gen: I can understand Carol’s need to want to protect the kids and teach them to defend themselves as a way to make up for what happened to her own daughter but it seems like she’s enjoying it a bit too much. It’s like she can’t wait to put a knife in a kid’s hand and have them stab something in the face. Wow, that baby has lungs.I think I may have made the same face Michonne did when Judith started to scream. Yikes.
Back at the fence, Rick tells Daryl to get the truck (saying he knows what to do). Inside, Carl is trying to make up a headstone for Patrick but scraps it when Carol tells him he was an atheist. She asks Carl not to tell Rick about her knife lesson again. Beth is heard singing to Judith as Michonne works out. Judith vomits on Beth and she asks Michonne to hold her while she cleans up, to which Michonne says “NO!” but takes her anyway, and then has a very emotional response to holding the baby. Beth chooses not to interrupt.
Daryl drives a truck out of the prison gates with Rick in the bed, throwing out live pigs that he’s cut so they bleed as bait to draw them away from the fence. The walkers feed and the group reinforces the part of the fence that they had pushed in while Rick has a moment showing frustration about having to kill the pigs that he had raised for food for the group.
- Sooz: Carol should know better than to bring it up; she almost guaranteed that Carl was going to “tell on” her by making a bigger deal of it then. Why is Beth singing again? Why are you not listening, writers? We. Don’t. Like. It. Okay, so we get it, Michonne’s got a ‘past’ with a baby, but now if Judith is crying so weirdly (presumably because she’s infected), now Michonne is exposed, too. DUN DUN DUUUUUUNNNN…. I would’ve just driven the truck up to the part of the fence about to give in to fortify it, but I guess given that the pigs could be the outbreak’s catalyst it doesn’t matter if they sacrificed them.
- Gen: Oh man, the singing. Made it all the way to episode 2 without Beth singing. Although it didn’t seem to bother me as much this time, probably because she was singing to Judith. She does have a nice voice but come on, AMC, this isn’t “American Idol: Apocalypse”. Michonne’s reaction to holding Judith came as a bit of a surprise for me, considering her reaction to her crying. There is definitely going to be some backstory for Michonne this season.
Carol gives the dead man’s daughters a lesson about walkers and how they’re not human. Rick disassembles the pigpen and lights the wood from it on fire, but not before Carl rats out Carol about her knife lessons to the kids. Rick says he’s not going to stop her or say anything about it, and then gives Carl back his gun.
Tyreese goes to visit Karen in isolation but finds the room bloody with a trail of blood that leads outside where both Karen and David’s bodies are lying as torched corpses. Cue shocked Tyreese face.
General Closing Comments
- Sooz: It’s a little soon to be giving Carl back a weapon, but that’s just me. Of course his arc may just need to progress right this second. With regard to Karen… ouch… I hated her at the end of last season because she kept calling for someone else to “DO SOMETHING” but I liked her again as of last week… well, I guess she got lucky since some characters only lasted a single episode; she at least got a few. I feel sorry for Tyreese but I wasn’t invested in her yet. Now we have the answers to two burning questions in the fanbase… what was Tyreese looking at so dramatically and whose back-of-the-head was that in the “they got in” promos? So far I’m feeling a little led on, like the promos for a reality series that keep saying “OMG you’re not going to believe what happens” and then … crickets. Not bashing (yet) but it was too predictable for an episode where the hype said it was going to start getting “crazy and emotional”. I feel like this week was a good time to have something more substantial happen (like maybe Judith getting obviously ill or the fence coming down… something) and it just fell a tiny bit short of that. Otherwise I’m loving being back to “single-campus shooting” where we’re not trying so hard to force in the stories from two different camps into the picture. NOT looking forward to the “governorcentric” episodes that have been foretold to us.
- Gen: This episode was pretty much the slap back to reality for the prison group. The level of comfort and calm from the first episode is now gone. Rick and Carl are armed once again and everyone is on high alert, just like the good ol’ days! It also left us with enough questions needing answers that we’ll all tune in next week (and sit through the endless bombardment of *%$^ commercials!) to get the next piece to the puzzle. I do have to admit though that Karen was a shocker. Was not expecting that one! I wonder if the same person who burned the bodies is the same one who has been feeding the walkers? Hmmm….
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