It's still the small-group-activities portion of the class, apparently. Maggie, Bob, and Sasha have a near miss with some walkers in the fog while continuing to search for Glenn. When they come across some railroad tracks and yet another of those signs advertising the safety and hospitality of the sanctuary billed as Terminus, Maggie argues they should go there, figuring that's where Glenn would go. Sasha's not entirely on board for such a long trek, but Bob's on Maggie's side. So it's a fine how-do-you-do when Bob and Sasha wake up one morning to discover that Maggie has gone on ahead. Bob has to all but drag Sasha along after Maggie, psychoanalyzing Sasha as they follow Maggie's trail. When they reach a town where Sasha won't go and Bob won't stop, Bob ends up going on alone. Even a kiss didn't persuade Sasha to join him. Which is lucky, because she ends up being the one to find Maggie, who was hanging back in the town waiting for them. The two of them fight off another group of walkers, and Maggie decides the three of them need to stick together after all, even after demonstrating how much damage she can do with a No Parking sign. Sasha's biggest fear, it turns out, is getting to Terminus and not finding Tyreese there, but she and Maggie decide to catch up with Bob and find out anyway.
While learning to hunt with Daryl, Beth steps into an animal trap. Daryl helps her to a funeral home, which has been kept in excellent condition by a person or persons currently absent, complete with a stocked pantry. Daryl has no sooner overcome his cynicism and decided that it's worth sticking around, than he accidentally lets in an entire herd of walkers. He makes a stand to give Beth time to escape, only to catch up with her dropped pack and to see a car peeling off into the night, with Beth presumably inside. Alas, Daryl's tracking skills don't extend to cars. He's sitting exhausted and defeated in the middle of an intersection when he's discovered and surrounded by another group. Their leader? The very same Tennis Ball Guy whose group overtook the house where Rick and Carl and Michonne were holed up a couple of weeks ago. After a brief, tense standoff, it looks like Daryl might have himself a new group. Or he just wants them to think he does.
Also going to Terminus? Glenn, looks like. Don't ask me what happened to the rest of his group. Maybe he ditched them, or maybe there just wasn't room for them in the final close-up.
We open on Bob, presumably in the days before he joined the prison. He's ragged, unshaven, wandering the woods alone with only a machete for defense. At some point he came across an abandoned lean-to in the woods, shored it up, and settled in for some of that thing Bob likes to do when it gets quiet (i.e. drinking). The zombies couldn't get in, but they could reach in, so eventually Bob moved on and found a nice high semitrailer to stretch out on top of. He'd just left it when up rolled Daryl on his chopper, and Glenn in the pickup, because that must have been when the prison's oil refinery was up and running. They made first contact, and Daryl was the one to ask Rick's famous three questions. How many walkers have you killed, how many people, and why? Bob's answers are 1) a couple dozen, 2) only one, and 3) "she asked me to." Bob's in, saying it doesn't matter who they are. He rides off in the back of Glenn's truck, smiling at the road behind. This was a good day for Bob.
Here's something we haven't seen much of on this show: fog. And it proves to be a damned inconvenient condition during the zombie apocalypse, as you might imagine. Present-day Bob, Maggie, and Sasha are standing in a circle -- actually a triangle -- with their backs to each other, engulfed in the stuff. They can hear what sounds like a significant number of walkers in the pea soup surrounding them, but can't see any until they're almost on top of them. Which, obligingly, the walkers start being, one by one. With knives and sharpened poles, they set about defending themselves. After dispatching one, Sasha looks up and has to shoot one off of Bob by blowing its arm off, then pulls another off Maggie, who is almost immediately borne to the ground by another. Sasha pistol-whips the skull of the first, then blasts a hole in the second one's as Maggie is trying to push it away. Sasha falls to her knees in front of Bob, who she thinks has been bit, but Bob assures her that the walker just got a mouthful of bandage. Yeah, that seems sanitary. Sasha hugs him, but lets go in a hurry when he says ow. "I didn't say stop," Bob points out. Too late. She stopped, and doesn't look like starting again any time soon.
Daryl is teaching Beth to hunt, apparently. He's letting her carry the crossbow as she follows a trail through the woods, with Daryl close behind her. Eventually they get to a clearing, where a walker is on its knees with its back to them and a gun on its hip. Armed zombies? That doesn't seem fair. Beth advances on it, only to step in an animal trap and collapse to the ground. To her credit, she maintains her grip on the crossbow and even manages to hit the zombie in the head with her one shot, but the arrow went through too low to hit the brain, and the walker keeps coming. Daryl rushes forward, brains the zombie by swinging the crossbow at its face, and frees Beth from the trap all in one motion. Whoever was trying to catch her is going to be disappointed.
Back in the foggy part of this episode, Maggie and Sasha are assessing the situation and debating moving on. Maggie wants to keep going, but Sasha and Bob outvote her. Worse, they're down to six bullets, and the compass that was in Maggie's pocket got broken in the fight. Always the optimist, Bob says they can steer by the sun. If it ever shows.
Daryl helps Beth limp to the edge of a cemetery, and rather than letting her sit down, he lets her hop on for a piggyback ride. Very dignified. Beth hopes there will be people in the house in the distance, and Daryl says that if there are he'll handle them. Beth schoolmarmishly says there are still good people, but Daryl says he doesn't think the good ones survive. That's a sunshiny thought. Beth slides off his back to pause at one gravestone and gaze over the implausibly well-preserved inscription dating to 1874: "Beloved Father." Daryl places some wildflowers on the headstone for Beth, and she gratefully takes his hand. Are we going to have to separate those two?
Maggie, Bob, and Sasha have come across not only better weather, but more railroad tracks and yet another notice advertising the slogan and location of Terminus, the sanctuary that we last saw Rick, Carl, and Michonne making for, as well as Tyrese, Carol, and the girls. Bob suddenly remembers the garbled radio broadcast he heard in the car with Daryl, Michonne, and Tyreese when they were making the drug run to the veterinary college, and thinks this must be connected. Maggie thinks they should go there, but not because she's giving up the search for Glenn; on the contrary, she says, "If he saw one of these he would go looking for me looking for him." She points out all the tracks radiating out from the same spot, which explains why this is the third sign we've seen. Sasha says it's too far and this might be the only sign, but Bob takes Maggie's side these time, saying Tyreese might even be there. "You want to take a vote or something?" Bob asks Sasha, moving closer to Maggie to underscore his point. Sasha resignedly leads the way up the tracks, because she doesn't need Nate Silver to know how that particular election would shake out.
Daryl and Beth arrive at the house on the edge of the cemetery, which looks like it might have been a plantation house back in the day and later became a funeral home, going by the guest book in the foyer. Beth observes that it's still clean, which tells Daryl that someone has been taking care of the place and might even be still around. The first person they find is a dead body - actually dead, dressed and laid out in an open casket and looking like he just died minutes ago. That is until Daryl scrapes some of the makeup off the corpse's face to reveal the gray, rotted meat beneath. Moving on downstairs to the embalming room, they find another body that looks half-finished, and Daryl opens the cabinets to look for something with which to wrap Beth's ankle. He makes a snarky comment about the body on the slab, and Beth says someone clearly cared enough to want the walkers to get a funeral. "They remember these things were people before all this. They didn't let it change them in the end." She thinks it's beautiful. I think her standards for beauty have declined.
Bob and Sasha are chilling at a makeshift camp, Bob checking the clean dressing on his shoulder wound while Maggie is off getting firewood. Bob figures Sasha wants them to stop, and wonders why. "To not die," Sasha says. Bob doesn't buy it, and doesn't think Sasha knows herself. She thinks that what happened earlier was a warning, and that the odds are that Glenn is dead, as they will be too if they continue. "We got six bullets and you're still bleeding." She wants them to hole up in the first town the tracks go through, and asks Bob to help her talk Maggie into it, or at least think about it. Yeah, he'll be sure to let you know how that goes, Sasha.
Up in the kitchen of the funeral home, Daryl and Beth find one cabinet stocked with PB&J, diet soda, and pig's feet. "White trash brunch right there," Daryl pronounces it. Oddly, it's just as dust-free as everything else in the house, meaning this must be someone's stash. Daryl says they'll take some and leave the rest, which Beth thinks proves her point that there are still good people. Daryl decides to prove her wrong by eating pigs' feet right out of the jar. Advantage: Dixon. As usual.
Looks like they might be staying a while, as Daryl strings a clattery homemade alarm system across the porch, and Beth plays the piano and sings a song in the viewing room. Daryl comes in, tells her the hatches are battened down, and hops up into a display casket. "This is the comfiest bed I've had in years," he says, to Beth's scandalized disapproval, and invites her to keep singing. She remembers that he wasn't such a fan of her singing last week, but now he shrugs, "There ain't no jukebox." Beth takes it up again, in a tableau that makes it look like she's singing at Daryl's funeral. So just to confirm what I've seen on a few t-shirts, we riot if that happens, right?
The morning, Sasha wakes up in the woods under a plastic tarp and sees Bob already up, but quiet. She comes around and sees him contemplating a message Maggie scratched in the dirt: "Don't risk your lives 4 me. Good luck." Holy shit, did you guys know that Maggie was secretly Prince? Sasha says Bob's name like they have to decide their move, but Bob's already decided: they're going to go after her and try to catch up with her along the tracks. Sasha isn't down, but she goes along anyway. For now.
Maggie's already on her way, walking into the rising sun along the tracks, when she comes across another Terminus notice at a switching station. Taking out her knife, she prepares to scratch a message of her own on the side of the utility box, but an approaching walker changes her plans. After killing it, she gets to work gutting it. One nice thing about the zombie apocalypse is that if you want to write someone a note, the ink comes to you.
Bob and Sasha walk up the tracks, which going by this tracking shot looks like a very handy place to mount the camera dolly. "Why haven't we been doing this all along!?" you can almost hear the crew asking each other. Sasha finally asks Bob why he's been so cheerful ever since they survived the prison exodus, and he finally explains the reason: it's because he's not alone, like he was after losing his first group, and his second group. "I broke that streak. You'd be smiling too." So far. Bob says Sasha is as stubborn as Maggie, but before they can continue the debate, they come up on the spot where that walker ran into Maggie. And the side of the utility box now reads, in walker-blood, "Glenn, go to Terminus. Maggie." What, no "2" instead of "to"? I suppose for her true love she can take the time to spell out her prepositions.
At the funeral home, Daryl takes Beth to breakfast. Like, literally, he carries her to the table. Hearing a noise outside, he grabs his crossbow and tells Beth to stay where she is. Turns out there's nothing on the porch but a one-eyed dog, which immediately causes Daryl to lower his guard. He should know better, and as he reaches for the dog's collar, he only startles it away. Beth comes out to the front room, clearly hoping to meet it, and Daryl tells her that it might come back. Surely that will be a good omen.
Sasha sits up late at night, where she and Bob are camped out in some half-ruined barn. She's been listening to the sound of a walker slavering somewhere out in the night for an hour when Bob wakes up. They speculate that it might be stuck, or following the night noises around in circles, and Bob reveals that he didn't sleep much when he was alone. Sasha tells him to do so now, and he agrees to try. After a minute, he sits back up and says, "I tried." Which would probably be funnier if my nine-year-old didn't pull that all the goddamn time. But walker-sounds aren't exactly the best white noise, I suppose. Sasha wonders what they're doing, and Bob non sequiturs, "Why do you think Tyreese is dead?" He figures Tyreese would make for Terminus if he were alive, and that Sasha must know that too, hence his question. "Or are you just too afraid to find out if he is or not?" She keeps mum, as Bob says he thought she was the toughest person he'd ever met, while also the sweetest. Not sure if either one of those is still true now.
At the funeral home, Beth is preparing to leave a thank-you note for their absent hosts. Daryl says she doesn't have to, because they can hang around instead. "When they come back, we'll just make it work." Beth realizes this means Daryl believes that good people are still around after all, and wonders what changed his mind. Daryl gets all cagey, and Beth eventually figures out the answer for herself, with the help of a long look from Daryl. Before this can get icky or anything, they hear the sounds of barking and the hubcap alarm system outside. This time Daryl just strolls casually to the door, all empty-handed, and swings it right open for the dog. Unlike we viewers at home, he somehow fails to notice that there's movement visible at eye-level through the boarded-up window. Sure enough, it's not until he's got the door wide open that he realizes there are a dozen or more zombies clamoring to get in. Jesus, what a fucking rookie move. Daryl braces himself against the door, unable to shut it but just holding it back, hollering at Beth for his crossbow and then telling her to run. He then flees before the inrushing walkers himself, yelling at Beth to get her shit and bail out so they can meet further up the road. While she makes a run for it, Daryl leads the walkers down to the embalming room, which only has the one exit. He fires an arrow at the first one that appears in the stairwell, then starts grabbing instruments and barricades himself behind a wheeled prep table (the one with the body on it, incidentally) so the zombies won't be able to get in biting range but he can still perforate some skulls. Which he gets to doing, then crawls underneath them and barricades them inside the room with another slab. On his way up the stairs, he snatches the arrow from the corpse in the stairwell, but I don't know if he's going to make it back to the foyer to pick up the one he fired there. And of course there are still plenty active inside the house, which is some damn thank-you note. Soon he's outside, running through the graveyard to catch up with Beth, clubbing down the one zombie who gets in his way. But it gets worse; as soon as he reaches the road, there's no Beth, but her bag was dropped on the pavement. While Daryl is contemplating this, a car suddenly starts up and roars off into the night, tires squealing. Daryl sprints after it, yelling Beth's name. I don't much like his chances of catching it.
morning, Bob and Sasha come across another message from Maggie to Glenn, this one the side of a shack but also in walker-blood. Did she stuff that thing's entire large intestine in her backpack? Bob figures they can catch up with her if they pick up the pace. Considering how stinky she's likely to be, is he sure they want to?
Daryl, however, doesn't appear to be catching anything. It looks as if he's been running down that road all night, so he's exhausted and his hair is even grosser than usual. Finally he comes to a set of railroad tracks where the road splits off in two directions; one going along this side of the tracks, and the other stretching out across them. And it looks like there are some things Daryl can't track after all. So this seems like as good a time as any for Daryl to drop his crossbow on the pavement and collapse, panting. He has clearly forgotten the immortal advice of Yogi Berra: "When you come to a fork in the road, take it."
Bob and Sasha cross into a town on the tracks, and Sasha immediately points out a two-story warehouse where she thinks they can set themselves up permanently. Bob insists he's not stopping, because Maggie's out there alone. Sasha says that was Maggie's choice, but Bob doesn't care. He assures Sasha that if Tyreese isn't at Terminus, it doesn't mean he's dead, and Sasha doesn't need to be afraid. She angrily says she isn't, and it looks like they're about to part ways, even though neither of them wants to. "I'm gonna try something here," Bob says. Sasha, knowing what that means, takes a step to face him, and sure enough Bob kisses her. On the mouth, but with no hands, and apparently not well enough to convince Sasha to join him. She tells him he doesn't have to be alone again, and he says he won't be. But Sasha will, Bob. Did you think of that?
After Bob keeps walking along the tracks, Sasha makes her way to that warehouse. She gets inside and up to the second floor, which is clear and empty with lots of natural light some great sightlines of the stairs. She looks around at her new home, puts down her stuff, and is soon crying. Worst housewarming ever. Momentarily, however, she pulls herself together and goes to look out the window, and contemplate the broken compass she's been carrying on foot for miles now. There's an odd sight outside: four motionless bodies scattered on the street to a derelict ice cream truck, but there's something about one of them. Trying to open the window, Sasha instead accidentally sends the entire pane toppling out of its rotted frame to crash spectacularly on the metal air conditioning unit below. The noise causes one of the figures near the ice cream truck to startle and sit up. Yep, it's Maggie, and she's still alive, even if she did make the questionable decision to nap while surrounded by her most recent kills. The bad news is that the crash is also attracting walkers from up and down the street. Grabbing her homemade pikestaff, Sasha races to Maggie's aid as walkers start flowing out of the doorways all over town. So, open doors and windows carefully in the zombie apocalypse, is the lesson we're getting tonight.
Sasha stands on the hood of one of the cars parked in a circle surrounding Maggie, and gets right to work with her pointed stake. Not to be outdone, Maggie appears to have uprooted a No Parking sign and is swinging its gory metal edge around like a taller, hotter Gimli. Soon the two women fight their way to each other and take up back-to-back defensive positions without exchanging a word. After Maggie bisects the head of the last one, she asks Sasha where Bob is. "Out looking for you," Sasha answers, and asks why Maggie is here. She says she was looking for another walker, presumably to start working on a short story, and says, "Found more than I wanted." What, she never dreamed of writing a novel? Her face still spattered with blood, Maggie tells Sasha that she heard everything Sasha said in camp two days ago, and although Sasha was wrong about them needing to stop and find a town, Maggie decided to wait there for her and Bob, because she can't do this alone. "And even if I catch up to Bob, we can't do it alone." She's also realized that she actually can ask Sasha to risk her life, because of what she'd be risking it for. Sasha admits that she is afraid, but she agrees, "So let's go get Bob and let's get there." Can't anyone ever battle zombies without battling their demons at the same time anymore?
Daryl is still sitting in the middle of that intersection with his crossbow at his side, when a pair of booted feet sidle up in front of him. "Well, looka here," says a deep voice. As Daryl slowly looks up, a total of six men surround him, all armed. The leader makes as if to grab Daryl or help him up, but Daryl's suddenly not as tired as he looks, because he knocks the leader to the ground, and is on his feet with his crossbow pointed at the man's face a second later. From the ground, the leader tells his men to hold up, even as they all level their weapons at Daryl. One of them, the one carrying a bow and arrow, preemptively claims Daryl's vest. "I like them wings." So does the internet, Bow And Arrow Guy. The man on the ground once again repeats his order to hold up, then guffaws when he realizes he's bleeding from the nose. That's some funny blood, I suppose. Believe it or not, we've seen this man before; it's Tennis Ball Guy, whose group took over the house Rick was holed up in before he and Michonne and Carl discovered the route to Terminus. I should have known that the show wouldn't have cast H!ITG Jeff Kober in that non-speaking part if he weren't going to be back. He seems to have given up his annoying habit of bouncing tennis balls all the time, which is unfortunate because otherwise Daryl would have heard him coming. He gets to his feet without picking up the shotgun Daryl knocked out of his hands, and expresses his respect for bow men like Daryl even as he's looking at him over the point of the arrow aimed at his face. He seems to know a lot about Daryl's weapon, and says he's been looking for one like it himself, only with more than the three arrows Daryl is down to, counting the one that's currently nocked) and "minus the oblongata stains." Then he gets serious and says that if Daryl fires, "These boys are gonna drop you several times over." I usually say once would be enough, but these days it would have to be twice. "Why hurt yourself when you can hurt other people?" he asks. So while Beth may have been right about there still being good people, Daryl now knows these guys aren't among them. He just keeps glaring over the point of his arrow, and The Artist Formerly Known As Tennis Ball Guy finally says, "Name's Joe." Daryl lowers the crossbow and grunts his own name. Everyone else lowers their weapons, so it looks like we've got a new group of seven. Which means it's only a matter of time before they're figuring out which Gilligan's Island character they all are. Or maybe that'll be me.
Bob hikes along the tracks, until he hears Maggie calling him from behind. He smiles before he turns, and accepts hugs from both of them before the reconstituted trio walks on.
Finally, there's yet another sign for Terminus, this one at a railroad crossing. A hand in an armored gauntlet reaches for the plastic covering the map, and the camera swings around on a tight shot of the hand's owner: Glenn, wearing his riot gear and looking winded. No sign of Tara, or Abraham or Rosita or Eugene. I guess we'll find out what happened to them week, or whenever the show decides to get around to them again. Which, going by the previews for week, looks like it could be a while.
M. Giant is a Minneapolis-based writer with a wife, a son, and a number of cats that seems to have settled at around two. Learn waaaay too much about him at Velcrometer, or just e-mail him at m.giant[at]gmail.com.