We open with Michonne, Rick, and Carl on the supply run that Rick mentioned at the end of the last episode. They zoom past a sign that says “Erin, we tried for Stone Mountain” and then pass a human on the side of the road, who shouts for them to pick him up. They don’t even slow down, and no one discusses the decision.
At the site of a giant car wreck, their car stalls in the mud; a group of zombies is immediately drawn to the hard-shelled, flesh-filled treat of the car (and one of them wears a bracelet that says “Erin.” Heh! But also, ouch!).
Rick and Michonne take care of the zombie threat, and then Rick and Carl create a makeshift lever to get the car out of the mud. Carl asks why Michonne has come with them; Rick tells him that for now, he and Michonne have the same problem (a problem named “The Governor”) and maybe they can work on that problem together.
Just as the car starts to move again, the hitchhiker reappears in the distance, begging them to take him with them. No dice! Michonne starts the car and they zoom off again. Gosh, imagine if people like Morgan or Glenn or Herschel had ignored Rick’s obvious need for help back in the day!
They drive on until they reach the town where Rick once lived; unfortunately, the sheriff’s office, where Rick was counting on finding lots of guns and ammo, has been completely cleaned out. Rick tells Michonne that there are other stores on Main Street where the owners had guns; he knows this because he’s the one who signed the permits.
Carl, Michonne, and Rick proceed cautiously through the empty town. They pass a broken down wall that shelters a pile of burned corpses, and bears a sign that says “Away With You.” Someone has also spray painted arrows on the street and behind them, another sign says “No guilt, you know that.” It’s creepy as hell, but clearly not the work of zombies.
Finally they get to what I assume is Main Street, which has been rigged up as a gigantic zombie trap, filled with trip wires and bamboo stakes. Another sign, painted on a sheet for variety, says “Just listen” and on the pavement beneath their feet, yet another warning says “Turn around and live.”
Michonne goes up to the roof to look for the sniper, but he’s already made his way downstairs. He and Rick cautiously stalk each other, and then Carl shoots him before Rick can.
“Are you okay?” Rick asks Carl. He scolds Carl that he should have run for the car. “I didn’t want you to have to do that.” Well, Rick, the kid had to shoot his own mother in the head so she wouldn’t come back and eat him alive, so I’m thinking a masked man with a gun threatening his father was probably slightly less traumatic, all things considered.
The masked man is wearing a Kevlar vest, so Carl’s bullet just knocked him out, rather than killing him. This bit is a little fuzzy since the bullet hit the guy in the ribs so I don’t quite see why he’s unconscious, but I’ll go with it, because the reveal when Rick peels off the face mask is so awesome! It’s MORGAN, played by the amazing Lennie James! (Of course, Morgan, being an African-American man, is making me fear for the life of Tyreese, because of the whole zero-sum game aspect of African-American male characters on this show!)
When Michonne wonders why Rick won’t leave Morgan unconscious on the street, Rick reveals that Morgan saved his life. “He wasn’t like this then.”
Michonne helps Rick carry Morgan up the stairs, warning Rick about a “Welcome” mat that covers up a pit of stakes. When they get upstairs, they realize that Morgan has amassed a lot of weaponry. He’s also written all over the walls, in a shorthand for crazy. The word “clear” appears all over the place, invariably written in bright red or yellow chalk.
“We’re waiting for him to wake up, and that’s it!” You can take Rick out of the Ricktatorship, but you can’t take the Ricktatorship out of Rick, I guess!
Michonne tells Rick that she thinks Morgan is dangerous; I wonder if it was the arsenal or the crazy writing that gave it away. “He wasn’t like this then,” Rick repeats, apparently forgetting that Shane “wasn’t like this then” and ended up trying to murder Rick.
Carl explores what Morgan has written everywhere, including a map of the town that shows “Rick’s house” as “burnt out.” Michonne settles in and enjoys a bag of crunchy things. “We’re eating his food now?” Rick asks her. “Mat said ‘Welcome’,” Michonne replies. You know what? She’s right! Also, she’s so awesome this episode that she’d be one of my favorite characters if she were like this always.
While Rick waits for Morgan to wake up, Carl decides to go on a run for baby stuff, including a crib for little Judith. Rick makes another one of his mystifying decisions, letting Carl leave with a woman he doesn’t really trust while he waits, alone, for the guy who tried to kill all of them, including said kid, to wake up.
Outside, Michonne and Carl walk past Walkers impaled on Morgan’s booby traps. Carl tells Michonne she doesn’t have to come with him; she replies that she told his dad she’d help him. Carl seizes the opportunity of an impending Walker to take off from Michonne, but she catches up to him.
Carl explains to her that he wants to get something for Judith that’s not available at the local baby store, and that he needs to do it by himself. Michonne follows him at a distance.
Finally, Rick shows Morgan the radio and Morgan makes the connection. He yells at Rick that he checked the radio every day at dawn, just as Rick told him to, and “YOU WERE NOT THERE!”
Rick tells Morgan that he found his wife and son and they had to keep moving, so he ended up out of range of the radio, but he tried. Morgan isn’t even really listening, because he’s telling Rick about how he, Morgan, was unable to kill his now-zombie wife with the gun Rick gave him. “I let it go like there wasn’t going to be a reckoning,” he says.
One day, Morgan went down into a cellar to check for food leaving Duane upstairs, and Morgan’s wife somehow followed them into the house. Duane pointed his gun at what was once his mother, but he couldn’t shoot her; trying to distract her, Morgan shouted at her. Instead, she bit Duane, and that’s when Morgan was finally able to shoot her. This is one of the most heartbreaking scenes on the show.
Meanwhile, Carl and Michonne arrive at the “King County Cafe.” Michonne tells him she’s not going to let him go in there. Carl persists, telling her that he has a plan and “this is important.” Michonne tells him that she can’t stop him, but he can’t stop her from helping him. Awww! I’m so glad Michonne has actual lines and conversations in this episode, because she has apparently been secretly awesome all this time!
Michonne and Carl wheel in some skateboards with caged rats strapped onto them. The zombies, smelling fresh rat meat, try to get the cages open. While the zombies are distracted, Carl runs in and grabs a photo of him, Lori, and Rick from over the counter. One of the rats escapes from its cage, and the zombies chase it down, finding Carl and Michonne. They run out of the cafe, but the picture falls from Carl’s hands. Velcro, Carl, look into it!!
Michonne orders Carl to wait outside the cafe doors which are partially made of glass, so how long can they even hold? I shouldn’t have worried because it takes Michonne all of about 20 seconds to return with Carl’s picture and a very cute cat sculpture that she took a fancy to.
Rick tries to persuade Morgan to return to the prison with him. Morgan tells Rick to take the guns, but he won’t go with Rick because he can’t bear to see anyone he cares about die again. “You will be torn apart by teeth or bullets. Not me. I’m not going to watch that happen again.”
“We both started out in the same place,” Rick tells Morgan. “You can come back from this, I know you can. This can’t be it, it can’t be. You gotta be able to come back from this.” Rick is talking to himself, though, because Morgan isn’t listening.
Rick, Michonne, and Carl bring a bunch of guns, and a Pack-and-Play and other baby supplies for Judith to their car. I hope they’ve picked up some soap and shampoo (maybe that waterless stuff you can buy for dogs) because I can practically smell Rick through my TV. Morgan deals with the zombie flytraps as Michonne asks Rick if he’s okay. “No, he’s not,” Rick tells her. None of them are, though, are they?
As they finish loading up the car, Rick asks Carl if everything’s okay with Michonne. “I think she might be one of us,” Carl tells him.
Michonne ascertains that Rick sees people, and reassures him that she used to talk to her dead boyfriend. They’re all crazy together.
As they pull away, we get a last glimpse of Morgan burning the zombies he pulled off his stakes. At the site of the road accident, Michonne avoids getting the car stuck again before they see huge smears of blood along the roadside. They pass the hitchhiker’s backpack, stop, and pick it up. In this world, a bag of supplies is far more valuable than the human being to whom the bag belonged. None of them are who they once were.
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Regina Thorne is an avid reader of just about everything, an aspiring writer, a lover of old movies and current TV shows, and a hopeless romantic.
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The themes are attractive, the scenes are well done, but it’s all too much violence for me. The walking decrepid humans are more a nightmare than a source of entertainment.
If I were 17, I might not mind.
Yep, this was a great episode. Makes me wonder if they’ll ever make use of the zombies like Michonne and or do as Morgan did with all of his traps, very smart. That backpack at the end, wow. Powerful episode.
My husband couldn’t believe it when I got hooked on this show, I don’t do violence. But I got so caught up in the stories of these people and what they we’re going through I never miss a show. Glad to see Rick is getting it together again.
But how did they end up so close to where they started out in the beginning? I mean, they went to the CDC, they’ve been traveling around. How did they not know the prison was that close to “home”? I’m hooked on this show, but this episode bothered me.
[b]@DorothyHayes [/b]- yeah, there’s no denying that it’s a very violent show (although the most violent and terrifying moments to me have tended to be implied human-on-human violence – usually orchestrated by the Governor – rather than the actual zombie-killing every week.) It somehow bothers me less than the violence on, say, “Sons of Anarchy,” because the zombies are more humanoid than human-looking, but I know everyone has their own line in the sand when it comes to these things.
[b]@MarkBlemish[/b] – it was really one of the best episodes of the series, perhaps because it was so focused. Before it started, I was a bit sad knowing that my favorite, Daryl, wouldn’t appear, but I ended up not even missing him.
[b]@Theresa N[/b] – ha! Yeah, my husband regularly makes mild fun of me for watching this (and for some reason he thinks I like zombie things in general, but no, it’s really JUST The Walking Dead that I like! And like you, I feel it’s not about the zombies, it’s about the humans and what they do to maintain their humanity (it’s the same kind of story that I loved about the first two seasons of Battlestar Galactica.)
[b]@BeckyIA [/b]- these are all good questions, but I sort of handwave the prison thing as Rick not realizing the prison would be a good place to hide out until they were actually THERE and he remembered it. Maybe it was a Federal prison and he was a small-town sheriff who vaguely knew about it, but didn’t really KNOW it. It was all worth it though, for me, just for Lennie James’s amazing turn as Morgan.