What happened?
Glenn attempts to keep it a secret that the barn houses zombies. Maggie, and Hershel, know they are kept there as friends and relatives that may one day be cured. Glenn does eventually tell Dale about it, and about Lori being pregnant. Lori sends Glenn to get morning after pills, and he goes to town with Maggie where they narrowly survive a nasty attack.
Shane takes Andrea shooting and they run into a zombie horde but survive, and have sex shortly after. Returning to camp Dale confronts Shane about what kind of man he is and suggest he leave, only to have Shane threaten him. Meanwhile Rick discovers Lori has taken the pills and finds her. She states she threw them up and also confesses that she slept with Shane.
Thoughts
This episode crunched down to a few pivotal conversations between two people to make it worthwhile but, really, it was perhaps the weakest of this season. A weak episode of The Walking Dead is still good television, mind.
Glenn’s inability to keep his mouth shut does, at times, feel slightly too stretched to believe but at least it gets the plot wheels turning. I particularly liked how Dale has been Glenn’s confidant because he, on the surface, appears to be the wise elder of the group. And whilst his handling of Lori and her pregnancy was relatively delicately done it was inconsequential. And his conversation with Hershel achieved nothing. So by the time he made the mis-step of confronting Shane it marked a triple whammy of blows to his stature.
As I suspected, the Hershel zombies are people they’ve known and people they believe may one day be cured. Having been so insulated from the outside world Hershel considers it a disease rather than the actual resurrection of a corpse. I struggle with this. One man, like Hershel, being swayed into this notion is one thing – but for someone like Maggie to share that view feels risible. I mean, they were attacked on some level consider how many are in the barn – so they must have seen the extent of what this ‘disease’ is truly about, no?
Maggie will, perhaps, be quicker to align with Rick’s group’s view considering what she saw in the well and, more pressingly, the encounter in the pharmacy. When Glenn stepped up and battered the zombie with its head hanging off Maggie ought to be under no illusions that these are just people that are ‘unwell’! Glenn’s actions here, and his care for Maggie, as well as her words to him may also mark the point where he stops being the skivvy of the group and decides to stand up and be counted more, too. He certainly isn’t leadership material, no matter what Maggie says.
Shane and Andrea’s shooting training foray was one of the less successful elements for me. I don’t particularly like Andrea’s character, for one thing (which may turn out very intentional). But the shift from absolute shooting no-hoper to stone dead zombie killing marksman was too severe a shift. There’s the scary potential now that someone as unhinged as her, learning how to detach her emotions to fluidly and effectively kill, may make her a seriously dangerous antagonist down the line. I just didn’t buy the transition. Some successful shots would have been acceptable – but standing there picking off zombies with ruthless aplomb within moments of being a gibbering wreck just didn’t not go over for me at all.
Fair play to her for being direct. Girls, want to have sex with a man? Just reach down and grope his cock and balls. And fair play to Shane for an equally charming response: park car and say, “Come on then”. They certainly do seem made for each other, for all kinds of wrong reasons, and together they may be worse then they’d have been apart – perhaps vying for Rick and Lori’s status as the king and queen of the group.
It was surely impulsive jealousy that prompted Dale to give Shane an ill-advised dressing down and suggest he leave. Dale, of course, will firmly believe he is acting in the bests interests of the group but there’s no doubt his affection for Andrea tainted his judgment. Shane’s rebuke, that if he was the man Dale painted him as then that would make him a threat to Dale, was totally predictable (in terms of his character) and a net result Dale would have foreseen had his emotions not got the better of him.
Fractures and leadership rivals are appearing in the group all over the place, and this feels like the beginning of the disturbances. The only thing that might bring some harmony and unity, and restore morale and faith in Rick, is if Sophia is finally found alive and returned to the group. It’s been so long hunting for her now. At first I thought it might remain unresolved but, after all this time, I can’t conceive the show letting this hang as a loose thread. Dead or alive, she will be found.
For what it’s worth, I’m fully expecting her to be alive. Even The Walking Dead wouldn’t be so brutal to hit the group and the audience with the despair of a dead little girl, right?
The episode abruptly ended following Rick and Lori’s conversation – the last of the big secrets finally outed. Lori confessed that she and Shane had been together when she thought Rick was dead, and Rick was surprisingly accepting of it. Indeed, he’d apparently even suspected as much. I did like that his reaction wasn’t to lose his head and go out looking for blood. Given how heated and upset he was already, finding out that Lori was pregnant and had attempted abortion without consulting him, he showed remarkable restraint in keeping his head.
I expect Lori will feel much better that the weight of her secrets will have been lifted, and might bring back more composure from her. She’ll need it. If she has, as it seems, caused no permanent harm then the pregnancy will be going ahead and she faces tough times. I expect the urgency to get some place safe, to set up as ‘home’, will become paramount. Hershel’s farm certainly isn’t it, and not just because Hershel doesn’t want them there. With the zombies in the barn and friction between the factions, not to mention the threat of zombies appearing at any time, the place feels like a powder keg waiting to explode. If and when that happens, I expect Maggie will join the group – but Hershel and the rest will be left behind.
What was the best part?
The zombie attacks were cool, although Andrea’s sudden transition from useless to marksman shattered disbelief and ruined that scene. So for me the best scene was Dale’s confrontation of Shane. The expression on his face when he saw Shane and Andrea return, fuelling his sense of righteousness, to finish up with him looking dumbstruck and slapped down after Shane issued his threat was really well-played.
A well-earned second place for best scene, though, to the part where the woman (not quite sure who she is in relation to Hershel) broke the leg of the chicken and fed it to the zombies. As if the twisted nature of feeding chickens to zombies wasn’t messed up enough, hobbling it and carting the distressed and pained bird to its horrific doom was a very unsettling concept.
What do I think will happen next?
As I understand it, the next episode marks something of a mid-season break. As such I expect there might be fireworks to come, potentially to end the Hershel’s farm tenure. One way or another the zombies in the barn are literally going to be the cats that got out of the bag and create mayhem. Hopefully Sophia will be found before the shit hits the fan, clearing the way for Rick and his group, and probably Maggie, to cut their losses and hit the road once more. Hershel, surely, will pay for his pious foolishness with his life.
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