SHOCK recaps tonights episode of THE WALKING DEAD with spoilers!
Weve seen Daryl coasting around on his motorcycle a lot this season, in a relatively zen state, despite the herd following the growl of his engine. But with this round of THE WALKING DEAD, its Easy Rider no more
The show which has been deftly spinning narrative plates and juggling timelines this season opens with Daryl once more leading Abraham and Sasha along the blood-spattered road with the grimy zombie herd following as quickly as their shambling, supernatural limbs can propel them. Suddenly, shots fire at the team from the sidelines and Daryl goes skidding down, the back windshield of Abraham and Sashas car blowing out and the villains giving chase. Daryl goes off one way, Abraham and Sasha turn around and face their attackers, blowing them to smithereens, along with a smattering of zombies that come-a-crawling
Meanwhile, Daryl collapses in the woods, right beside the charred body of a barely moving ghoul.
Slam to credits
Daryl tries his damnedest to summon his comrades on the CB to no avail and, considering his leather jacket is shredded and bloody, he loses his leather and shows off his impressive pipes, along with an impressive amount of road burn on his left arm. He picks up his deluxe crossbow and goes hunting, where he finds two shivering girls who claim what they took, they earned before an unseen figure smashes him in the face and he goes down.
Flitting in and out of consciousness, he catches glimpses of his attackers and captors and we learn that he might be the victim of mistaken identity. Regardless, the trio steal Daryls stuff an lead him at gunpoint through the woods, where they stumble upon legions of burned ghouls. They tell Daryl that it was they who fried the forest to burn the dead
Norman Reedus is really rocking the Snake Plissken vibe this episode and even composer Bear McCreary knows it, with signature grinding guitar stings that sound like vintage John Carpenter swagger.
With that, Daryl escapes the trio, who he has gleaned are not bad people, and they shoot at him as he runs away with their stuff. Hiding behind a fallen tree, he tries to unsheathe his crossbow from the teams duffel bag. As he struggles, an awesomely gross, moss encrusted swamp zombie that looks exactly like SWAMP THING stumbles into frame. In the nick of time, Daryl liberates his crossbow and takes the creature out
But after he pulls the arrow from the ghouls green skull, he examines the bag and finds a cold-pack of insulin. It seems one of the girls is a diabetic, leaving Daryl with a moral conundrum: flee or find his former captors and give them back the lifesaving elixir?
We then cut back to Abraham and Sasha who, after trying in vain to decipher the motives of the raid that decimated their vehicle, find an insurance office in the neighboring town. Abraham wants to kill as many zombies as he can find, but Sasha urges him not to waste his energy, dialing down Abrahams blood-lusty bravado.
After Abraham gleans that one of the employees was a veteran, he find Sasha sitting in front of a Plexiglas trapped office zombie who is weakly trying to get at her, but obviously cannot. When Abraham finds her, he can only think of decimating the undead dude but, again, Sasha tells him to chill out and just leave it be. Its a moment of pathos for the dead, in a show that has had very little of that. George Romero has cited that element as a failure of the program, that the zombies are just target practice and have no personalities. This is true, but this moment reminded me of the sequence in DAWN OF THE DEAD where Gaylen Rosss Fran mournfully watches a baseball player zombie who stares at her through the locked department store door.
As Abraham curbs his typical rage, he and Sasha begin talking, getting to know each other and share almost existential passages of dialogue.
Meanwhile, good old Daryl returns the duffel bag just in time, shocking the trio who now realize that Daryl is not one of the bad dudes hunting them as they previously believed. But said bad dudes do show up and shout out to the trio that they will take them back. The trio scream that theyre done kneeling and, with Daryl guiding them, they hightail it into the woods to hide.
Daryl sees a ghoul trapped by a rock and lures one of the villains towards it. The bad guy gets the bite and his colleague hacks off the bitten arm and tells the poor sod to walk it off. Whoever these guys are theyre hardcore!
Back to the Abraham/Sasha thread, the ginger-haired hero find a hummer on the roof and an arsenal in its trunk. And a half-full box of cigars. The driver of the hummer is hanging over the edge of the roof and, after Abraham screams in its face but doesnt kill it it thrashes and slides off its impaling rod before smashing to the ground and leaving the rocket launcher it had in its back for Abraham to take. Suddenly, Abraham thinks that Sashas urges not to randomly put down every ghoul he sees might be wise advice.
Returning to the office, Abraham lights a cigar and, looking her dead in the eye, tells Sasha that hed like to stay there, set up a home and that hed really like to get to know Sasha better. She catches his drift. And so do we. After my recap last week, where I suggested that Maggie and Aaron would be wise to hookup now that Glenn is (presumably) dead and was promptly reminded that Aaron was actually gay (which I knew, but forgot about), its nice to see the actual promise of apocalyptic nookie between good characters we love on the horizon. This show needs more sex, damn it.
Meanwhile, after one of Daryls new friends is eaten by a pair of shrink-wrapped zombies, the remaining two inexplicably pull out a gun and steal his crossbow and motorcycle.
Says the girl: Were sorry!
Says Daryl: Yer gonna be
No doubt.
Wandering back to the location he started at, with the burned, helmet-wearing ghoul, Daryl finds said zombies truck, a fuel truck that is ripe for the taking. He doubles back to find Abraham and Sasha, who give up their domestic fantasy and the three begin to head back to Alexandria. As the truck rolls down the road, Daryl tries Rick on the CB again. He gets someone and that someone, I think, says Help.
Is it Rick?
Or is it Glenn?
See you next week!
