We start off with decorating, a slow shot of potted plants
by the steps to the cellblock, and Rick, looking exactly as he did about 9
months ago. The prison has come along lately, thanks to more people, new
gates combined with spikes, and a farmyard. Cisterns with pumps provide
shower water, and they’ve even gotten a horse. Hershel has a fancy new
prosthetic leg, and ‘Lil Asskicker has a new bonnet. Carl no longer wears
his father’s old deputy hat. Or carries a gun. Beth has found a
mall with the latest fashions. Glenn and Maggie have grown out their
hair. Daryl is now a celebrity in Prisonville, when once he was the
redneck little brother who took Merle’s shit and was only valued for his
hunting.
Rick is listening to the most awful country music I have
ever heard, from an unseeable source, probably an iPod. He digs through
mud in one of the farm fields, accidentally finding an old, possibly rusted out
handgun. Left there when Woodburyans fled the prison attack? Did Hershel
leave it by mistake when the Governor ambushed them? Rick takes out his
earbud, yanks out the ammo clip, and throws the weapon and its ammo into his
wheelbarrow. Dude, there could be a bullet in the chamber. Be a
little more careful next time. We realize, as this is happening, that
Rick’s music is to drown out the moans and screams of his audience of walkers
at the fence. They are much louder this season, as if two years of
undead-ness has made them more desperate, more obnoxious. Rick grimaces
at them, the way we look with pity at the People of Walmart. A walker
with eyes sunken way back into his sockets and old dried blood stains leaking
from said eye sockets is especially gross. Rick puts the earbud back in,
and goes back to digging in the mud.
Prisonville has taken on numerous newbies: Sasha,
Tyrese, and Karen from Woodbury, plus Zach and Bob from who knows where.
And, for some reason, Harry Potter got stuck in Georgia during the
Zombiepocalypse. He is on kitchen duty with Carol, witnessing Carol and
Daryl share an old friends moment. Potter cannot resist thanking Daryl
for a fresh deer by shaking his hand. Daryl is stuck, holding a bowl
while eating with the other hand, so he licks the fingers of his free hand
before shaking. To his credit, Potter doesn’t beat an eyelash over it.
I guess Daryl’s spit is worth something. Food, of course, is
an elemental that is not conjurable by magic. So Harry Potter needs Daryl to
actually bring in some in order to cook it by magic. Carol pulls Daryl aside,
leaving Patrick in the kitchen, to show him new walkers lining the fences, with
Fence Cleaners (yes, an actual job description in Prisonville) already at work
on them. But the morons are too close together, so the walkers bunch up
and can be a threat. Daryl points out that the walkers need spreading
out, and that when his team leaves on a scavenging mission, that should draw
some off. But Carol is insistent – he won’t have as big a team as he
wants, as Carol needs these walkers cleaned out before her big tea party tomorrow.
Glenn and Maggie wake up. It is ridiculously cute as they debate whether Maggie should go on the supply run today. I’m so over the cuteness.
Tyrese finds Karen, the diplomat who ended last season’s war
in thirty seconds, and tells her that Fence Cleaning just ain’t his bag, but
killing them beyond the fences seems a little easier to him. Karen seems
nonplussed at someone who’s ditching duty to go out, but it turns out they’re a
couple, so she lets him off the hook. Zach, a teenager from who knows where,
sees Beth dressed up like Madonna in Desperately Seeking Susan, and they have a
romance novel moment before Beth walks away, refusing to say goodbye.
Bob, a man on his own until Daryl brought in him a week prior to the
episode, asks Sasha, who is almost in the car, if he can come. He wants
to earn his way here, but I think he could just as easily Fence Clean, or do
the breakfast dishes (unless Harry Potter has already done them by
magic). Glen vouches for him, as Bob was a medic in the Army. Already
trained to work in a team, with some emergency medicine knowledge, Bob could be
handy today. So Sasha reluctantly agrees.
Rick sees Carl, who looks like an actual kid again, and
razzes him for reading comics all night. They look over a pig on the other
side of a corral, whom Carl has named Violet. Rick razzes him about
naming food, and they both wonder, why is the pig sick? Isn’t there a
veterinarian somewhere who could help them?!?!?! But I digress, because
Michonne rides a horse to Prisonville’s new nifty gate, with stakes in a weird
arrow configuration that makes it possible to open/close them quickly with very
little chance walkers could get in. I’m going to guess Michonne thought
of it. After handing Carl new comics, she hands Rick a razor and tells
him to at least put some effort in. She tells them “no sign of
him”, and all know who the “him” is, including Daryl who has just ridden
up. Michonne and Daryl debate whether it’s worth it to ride up to Macon,
which is 70 miles away. There’s no resolution, and Rick has no
interest in mediating or deciding this for them. Michonne decides to go
out with the supply run, and Rick tells Carl to brush the horse down and then
go play, and maybe even attend storytime.
Carl good-naturedly agrees. Gone is the little shit
who thought he was a mini-adult and shot another kid just cause he thought the
other kid might shoot him first. Carl’s whole character has reverted to
basically, the beginning of season 2. He is a kid, a tweenie, who wants
to see the Grand Canyon again. It has made him whole and easier to
manage, but what happens when he’s really an adult? This ain’t Peter Pan,
and Prisonville ain’t Neverland.
Hershel and Rick have a conversation about replanting leaves
to increase what I’m guessing is a strawberry crop. Hershel also takes
this moment to tell us, the viewers, that Prisonville is governed by a council
(Hershel, Sasha, Daryl, Carol and probably someone else, I want to say Glenn),
and the moment to tell Rick that said council has decided that when Rick leaves
Prisonville to check the game traps, he has to take his gun. Rick has
been getting along with a knife recently, and I don’t blame him. Firing a
gun without the most dire need right where they live should have been forbidden
by the council, but I guess they worry Rick needs a firearm. So he takes
his gun. The game traps are a bit in the magic forest, where Rick
encounters a wild pig, still breathing but downed by something. As he
approaches, he hears the characteristic sound of a walker approaching, and sees
a female in old, dirty clothes practically collapse on the boar. He
decides to retreat, but the female hears him. Instead of attacking, she
calls out to him. This was a great twist on the whole
let-a-zombie-approach-because-you-think-the-dead-person-still-exists-in-there.
Instead of a zombie, we get an extremely dirty woman with an Irish
accent. Turns out she was on her way to her honeymoon with hubbie, stuck
in an airport for four days, and on the run ever since when walkers got into
the airport. Hubbie is a short walk away, so Rick decides to go back to
her camp with her, take a look at hubbie, and decide whether they can come to
Prisonville if they answer his questions three. Literally. He has three mystery
questions for them. What is this, a bridge in Monty Python’s Holy
Grail? I hope Irish girl can remember the difference between the African
and European swallows.
Some of the kids from Woodbury gather at the inner fence to
stare at the walkers as the Fence Cleaners do their work. The Cleaners
have moved a whopping five feet away from each other, making them only slightly
less bunched up than before. I swear, Carol needs to come out and
bitchslap them all. The kids have noticed that one walker has a nametag
with “Nick” on it, and so have named all the walkers in front of them.
Carl and Harry Potter show up behind them, and Carl lectures them on the
non-personhood of walkers, and tells the kids to stop naming them. Yes, he’s
just repeating Rick’s razzing to younger kids. He tells the kids they
haven’t seen what these walkers can do, but that’s so not true. I’m sure
each of those kids has at least one dead parent, and seen numerous people get
eaten. The kids decide that Carl is a dick, which he is, and they decide
it’s story time, so they walk off. Harry Potter sheepishly admits
he likes storytime too, and goes off, leaving Carl with his soccer ball.
And Nick.
The supply run team: Brave and fearless leader Sasha,
Daryl, Tyrese, Bob the medic, Glenn, boytoy Zach, and Michonne, approach a
fenced in area with temporary structures in front of a big box store named “Big
Sp!t”, which is supposed to avoid trademark infringement. Sasha &
Glenn, days ago, cut a hole in the fence and set up a boom box with bad music
to lure the walkers inside out and away, giving them free run of the grounds.
They cautiously sweep, passing by long-truly-dead bodies as they approach the
store. Daryl pounds on the glass, tells Zach to cool it, and waits for
the walkers to come to them, where they can be bottlenecked and slaughtered at
the store entry doors. Zach plays a game with Daryl, basically guess what
Daryl did before the Turn. I think it’s funny people think Daryl had a
job before the Turn. My guess would have been “inmate at the prison”, but
Zach has decided that Daryl was a cop. Daryl is so amused that he plays
along, telling Zach he was an undercover cop. Michonne is not having it,
as she knew Merle, but Zach buys it for about a second, then tells Daryl he’ll
guess again tomorrow, which is how we know Zach will die in this episode.
After sweeping the store for walkers, the team splits
up. Glenn looks longingly at baby shit. Michonne kills a zombie
marketing cardboard cutout. Bob lingers over the wine, obviously trying
to stay on the wagon. At first he loses the battle. Then, as he
returns the wine back to its shelf, the whole shelf crashes down, spilling wine
everywhere and bringing two display shelves down on Bob’s foot. The
others prepare to help him, only to find walkers falling through the roof
above. Turns out a helicopter crashed into the roof, weakening the
structure (architect’s note: the roof should have collapsed long before this
episode), so when walkers came walking toward the sound of the shelves
crashing, they ended up causing the roof to fail altogether. Walkers fall
through the ceiling over and over, and the team can barely keep up, let alone
free Bob. Daryl manages to keep Bob from getting eaten, and Zach pitches
in by lifting the shelves. But a walker crawls under the lifted shelves
to bite Zach in the ankle. Before anyone can cut his foot off, said
walker chomps into Zach’s neck, spewing blood everywhere. Then the
helicopter finally falls through the roof. The team barely gets out
before the helicopter falls into the store, bringing the whole roof down.
Mission failure, thy name is Bob.
Rick’s new friend reaches her campsite, and is so excited to
tell hubbie that they have a new friend. Hubbie isn’t in the tent- he’s
in some sort of clump on the ground near the supplies, while Irish lady’s tent
is neat and tidy, not looking like the home of someone starving at all.
And there’s only one sleeping bag. Rick easily deflects the Irish lady’s
knife stab, throwing her to the ground and drawing his gun. But Irish
lady is too quick for him. Needless to say at this point, she wanted Rick
as food, not for herself, but for her undead hubbie, who she didn’t have the
heart to put down. But she has the nerve to stab herself in the abdomen,
collapsing on the grass as she begs Rick not to put her down, let her turn and
be with her husband. Irish wants Rick to ask his three questions now, so
she can at least know what they were. Here we go- 1- how many walkers
have you killed? None, hubbie killed them until he died. 2- how
many people have you killed? Only herself. 3- Why? Because
you can’t come back from doing that, Irish tells him. Rick leaves her
there to turn and join hubbie. When he returns to Prisonville, Rick later
goes outside, seeing that Violet is dead. A normal person would remove
the carcass, probably burn it since Violet was sick. But Rick just stares
at the pig. Hershel later consoles him as he holds Lil Asskicker, looking
ridiculously cute in her new pink bonnet. Hershel reminds him that both
he and Carl “came back” from the trauma of the last season. Rick goes outside,
and sees the same walker with the formerly bleeding eyes again. People
and pigs die. Good to know you can count on the walkers to stick around.
Carl has decided he wants in on storytime after all, and
sneaks into the library. Carol is reading from the Adventures of Tom
Sawyer for about seven kids and one other adult, who leaves eventually.
Carol lets him go, then stops reading, sending one of the kids to watch while
she pulls out a box of knives. Huge knives. She starts right in on
her knife-holding lesson until Harry Potter asks to be excused. Carol
tells him to stop being a pussy, but it turns out Potter is actually unwell, and
needs to throw up. So Carol lets him go this time and gets back to it,
until Carl stands up, revealing himself to Carol and the other kids.
Carol only asks Carl not to tell his father, and Carl leaves without saying
anything. No one should ever question Carol, who has been right about
everything she’s ever had an opinion on and is the best person to train kids to
defend themselves. And Rick has been blasé about anything anyone wants to
do since dismantling his Ricktatorship. So why storytime should be in
danger is beyond me.
The supply run team gets back, and each has different ways
of dealing. Glenn tells Maggie, since Zach was Beth’s boytoy.
Maggie tells Glenn that she’s not pregnant, and Glenn stupidly asks how she
knows. WTF, hasn’t Glenn seen Caddyshack? They debate whether to even
have kids, with Glenn thinking it’s a bad idea, and Maggie saying it would be
possible in Prisonville. They very cutely don’t resolve anything.
Daryl tells Beth, whose whole reaction is to change a sign in her room from
“This workplace has had 30 days with no accident” to “0”. In other words,
OSHA’s gonna’ be all over them. Beth just can’t cry anymore, she tells
Daryl. Daryl says he’s tired of losing people. Yeah, it’s a real
drag. So Beth hugs him. Tyrese finds Karen sewing, and sits next to
her, telling her he doesn’t like going outside, either. Bob lays in his
cot, thinking about what an asshole he is. Michonne studies a map that
shows Macon County, so she will be going there, whether Daryl thinks it’s worth
it or not.
Harry Potter stumbles out of bed, so feverish his body is
covered in sweat. He gets to the showers, pumps water from the water
barrel he then coughs into, and tries to take a shower. Instead he
collapses in the shower. As his footprints dry off, we see him in a pool
of his own blood, having bled from his eyes, nose and mouth. Then his
eyes open. So now there’s a walker loose in the showers. Don’t bend
over for the soap.
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