After being forced to abandon the prison, and their group, and Judith's blood-filled car seat, Rick and Carl are not exactly their best selves. Rick's very recently been beaten to within an inch of his life by the late Governor, plus he's having to deal with all kinds of attitude from Carl. The kid's pissy, disobedient and arguing with everything Rick says. Eventually they find a house to hole up in, and more than one kind of wound is reopened as they batten down for the night.
The morning, Rick is dead to the world. While he sleeps or possibly even comas the day away, Carl takes it upon himself to go out into the neighborhood, deal with a few walkers, score some supplies and generally prove his independence to himself. All of this is done in typical Carl fashion, which is to say that he is an idiot who would have gotten killed several times over were he not a series regular. But then he goes back to the house and unloads on Rick, blaming him for the fiasco at the prison and claiming he doesn't need him any more. But he does so while Rick is still passed out, so he's not actually that brave.
The only other member of the group we spend any time with is Michonne, who reverts back to her pre-Woodbury self and adopts a fresh couple of zombie pets with which to travel the countryside. In the process, a dream sequence gives us a little backstory on Michonne and her original pets -- who, it turns out, were her boyfriend Mike and Mike's friend, back in the days when only the living walked the earth and those two gentlemen still had arms and jawbones. It's not yet clear what all happened between their happy salad days in Atlanta and the day Michonne met Andrea, but she also had a kid once and now she clearly doesn't, in case you didn't think she was tragic enough. Michonne decides she she's done with tragedy, shakes off her herd and decides to follow the Grimeses' tracks rather than continuing with her new pets and forcing me to make a "what has six feet, ten fingers, and thirty-two teeth?" joke.
Rick is unconscious for so long that when he stirs again the night, barely mobile and wheezing through a semi-collapsed lung, Carl thinks he's died and turned. He comes thisclose to killing Rick with Rick's own service revolver, but loses his nerve. Lucky for him Rick's just hella hurt, and the two end up patching things up somewhat as Carl realizes he still needs Rick and Rick realizes Carl's a man. And then Michonne finds them, so maybe things are on their way to getting back to how they were after all.
Nah, who are we kidding?
We're picking right up where we left off; namely the scene of devastation at the prison. Mitch's bombed-out tank stands in the inner yard, belching black smoke into the sky; Michonne's horse lies gutted in the grass; and so does the Governor, with a bullet hole in his skull. And of course there are walkers everywhere, converging on the prison buildings. Not that there's anyone left alive in there. At a distance, Michonne follows them toward the prison, katana in hand, and takes in the destruction. She keeps walking, barely pausing long enough to slice off a few zombie heads before making it safely over the spike barrier just outside the destroyed front gate, just ahead of a pair of good old dead boys that had their curdled-milk eyes on her. Her two pursuers obligingly impale themselves, and after collecting the rope from the mechanism of the ruined gate -- and the arms and jaws from her two former pursuers -- she's got herself a fresh pair of zombie pets. The three of them make their way back out across the field, and Michonne soon comes across Hershel's severed, but not actually dead, head. With her sword, she puts an end to its gasping and slavering, and after choking back some tears, she soon leads her new party on its way, away from the prison. Just like old times.
Rick and Carl walk up a muddy dirt road with nothing but the clothes on their backs, the guns at their hips, and that dumb-ass hat on Carl's sweaty head. Carl's in the lead, not bothering to wait up for Rick, who only minutes ago was beaten 90% to death by the Governor, and is thus not his usual energetic self. Rick calls out to Carl to slow down, his voice sounding of broken teeth and a recently squished windpipe as he says they need to find a safe place, food, and supplies. He tries to tell Carl they'll be okay, but the look of pure hatred Carl gives him shuts him right up. Sounds like it hurts to talk anyway.
They eventually find their way to an abandoned roadside mom and pop restaurant. Or rather a son and pop place, called Joe and Joe Jr.'s. All these independent establishments are kind of contrary to the usual zombie themes, don't you think? Rick and Carl have a pretty salty debate about whether Carl's coming in or not, which Carl wins given Rick's decrepit condition. In other words, they go in together. The place seems clear, other than the party room to the side, where a towering zombie is chilling behind a makeshift barricade of chairs, tables, and barstools. Rick wants to draw it out rather than , while Carl finds a note: "Please do what I couldn't -- Joe Jr." I wonder if the theme of a son being unable to kill his father will pop up again late. The zombie that presumably used to be Joe Sr. comes crashing through the chairs at Rick, who buries his hatchet in the undead forehead. But the thing doesn't go down, and Rick's holding it back with his free hand while telling Carl to get going. Instead, Carl shoots it down, which Rick isn't happy about. "Every bullet counts," Rick lectures. "We'd have needed that one later." Oh, just you wait, Rick. They get to looting. Rick returns from the kitchen with a sack of goodies and grows, "My haul. You?" Carl adds his and snots, "I win." Not that either one of them is in any shape to open those pickle jars anyhow.
Michonne and her new Michonne-Tones arrive at a muddy road, where she sees fresh bootprints in the mud. Human ones, too, not dragged like those of walkers would be. Or like the way we saw Rick walking earlier. Hmm, oops. Rather than following the tracks, Michonne leads the pets right across the trail and into the woods in the far side.
Rick and Carl are back to walking, and they've arrived at a big house at the edge of a small town near some railroad tracks. As they move in, and Carl's still being rebellious, and not careful enough for Rick's taste. Rick tells him to knock it off, so Carl starts pounding on the walls and yelling, "Hey, asshole! Hey, shitface!" He could be yelling at hypothetical zombies, but he's looking right at Rick's face when he does it. Carl is unrepentant when Rick tells him to watch his mouth, and moves on upstairs. Rick checks the kitchen, where the left-open fridge is a disaster, but he scores a couple of good kitchen knives. Upstairs, Carl finds himself in some cool teenager's room, which includes a big TV and game system. He admires the surroundings a moment before catching his reflection in the dark screen and cannibalizing the cables. Oh well, some of those games looked like they were rated M anyway.
That night, when he's using them to tie the front door shut. And arguing with Rick when the latter tries to shove the sofa against the door too. Carl defends his knot: "Shane taught me. Remember him?" Rick says he remembers him every day and invites Carl to add any further thoughts he might want to share. Instead of taking him up on it, Carl puts his shoulder to the couch, which they push into place with an effort that leaves Rick gasping. Rick then offers Carl a packet of food, which Carl tries to refuse. But Rick insists, in a way that indicates that he's done playing good cop for the night. That accomplished, Rick limps to the bathroom, now wheezing as though he punctured a lung, and takes a look at the damage to his face and torso. That's a surprisingly clean mirror in there, more's the pity.
It looks like we're paying a visit to the past, before the zombie apocalypse, Michonne and her then-alive boyfriend Mike argue about some movie with Mike's toolish friend, while the high-rises of downtown Atlanta glitter outside the apartment window. She finishes cutting up some vegetables, then wipes the blade she was using and slips it into the knife block…which is odd, because at some point the kitchen knife turned into her katana without her noticing, which is the first sign that this is less flashback than dream sequence. A little boy runs in and Michonne scoops him up and carries both him and the snack plate to the men at the table. And this is clearly a dream sequence, because suddenly the two men are in post-apocalyptic duds arguing about their move, while fancy pre-zombie Michonne just smiles indulgently at them like they're kidding around. She pushes the plate across to them while they're trying to figure out "The Answer," and when she looks back at them, the apartment has gone dark and they're looking blankly back at her -- armless. So now we know where her original pets came from. Michonne looks around her post-disaster apartment, sees the kid gone and Atlanta in ruins outside, and flips her shit. So…clearly it's time to wake up from the nightmare. Which she forthwith does, in full daylight, holed up in the front seat of an abandoned car, while her new pets chill outside. If she's having dreams like that she should probably start being more careful about what she eats before bedtime.
Presumably that same morning. Carl wakes up on a mattress on the ground floor of their squat for the night, picks up his gun and a bag of cereal, and lets Rick continue to sleep on the couch. Making a stop in the kitchen to pour himself not one but two bowls of cereal, he ends up reading a dead-tree book in the upstairs bedroom for a while. Eventually he gets bored, comes down, and finds Rick still sacked out on the sofa, apparently not having moved at all. Carl starts shaking him and yelling at him to wake up, but the only response is the sound of zombies on the far side of the door he tied shut the night before.
Going to the back and coming around to the front with his hat on, Carl finds a couple straight out of Undead American Gothic trying to scratch through the door. He looks around the quiet street, gets their attention, and lures them away, walking backwards some distance down the street with his gun drawn but not leveled. I guess he's trying to get them away from the house before he uses his gun, lest the You'd think he would have learned his lesson about this before, but I guess it's not like he can get Dale killed again. Sure enough Carl gets all cocky, leading them into someone's backyard. And of course, as he's walking backwards, a third zombie appears out of nowhere behind him. Carl almost backs into it before he realizes it's there, and he suddenly realizes that he's gone from in charge to surrounded just like that. After the ads. Carl finds himself grappling with all three of them before he can get his gun to bear, and then sprawling on the ground. The zombies close in, and Carl shoots one and then another through the head. They both go down, but they land on top of him, and the third one's still coming. Panicking, he wastes two bullets before finally putting one in its brain, at which point it just collapses onto the hogpile Carl's on the bottom of. He eventually manages to wriggle free, vomit up one of his bowls of his cereal, replace his dumb-ass hat, and recover his gun. "I win," he tells the pile. Maybe, but he sure as hell didn't cover the spread. And he has five fewer rounds than when he left the house. And he'd have lost if that had been Twister or Jenga or just about any other game. But Carl returns to the street, looks around and, says, "Cool," before heading back to the house. So there goes the last chance of that having been a successful encounter, because he clearly learned nothing.
Michonne follows her pets through the woods, and soon she's in the middle of a herd, all of whom are ignoring her. Michonne is unfazed by her new hang until she glances over at a zombie walking at her side, who used to be a person who wore her hair in long braids like Michonne's. I think the zombie's braids are real, though.
Returning to the house, Carl tells Rick about the walkers he killed, saying, "I saved you. I didn't forget while you had us playing farmer. I still know how to survive. Lucky for us." He tells Rick he doesn't need him any more for protection. He rages on that Rick couldn't protect Judith, or Hershel, or Glenn, or Maggie, or Michonne, or Daryl, "or Mom." At least he doesn't bring Shane up again. Carl blames Rick for waiting around at the prison until the Governor came back and took it all away. "You were their leader! But now, you're nothing." Carl dumps out the sack of food on the floor at the foot of the couch and spits, "I'd be fine if you died." Rick's reaction to all this? Is to continue to be in a coma. Pretty brave, Carl.
Carl's back on the street, and finds another likely house to raid. Before entering, he uproots one of those solar yard lights, the kind with a sharp plastic spike on the end so you can drive it into the turf. Amazingly, the spike comes out along with the metal stake, which never happens. He mounts the porch steps, takes a look at the front door, and hurls himself at it. And promptly bounces off, dazed. So if nothing else, it might still be handy to have someone around who weighs more than a hundred pounds. And I'm sure Rick can tip the scales that far between showers. Carl uses the stake as a lever to force the door jamb. He enters to some disarray, as though the family that once occupied the place was in the middle of moving when shit went down, but the kitchen seems well stocked. Those stocks including a big can of pudding that Carl climbs up to retrieve from the top of the cabinets. Then he proceeds upstairs to check the rest of the house, finding boxes and crap stacked on the stairs and the landing. The master bedroom has a dead crab or something on the carpet, which looks like it crawled out of a brackish fishbowl that still stands on a three-legged table near the foot of the bed. Which is a totally reasonable place to keep your aquatic pets because who would ever knock that over in the middle of the night? Carl closes that and the other upstairs door, and opens another one a crack. And of course that's the one the zombie's in. Carl tries to force the door closed, but the zombie's not having that, even when Carl breaks its arm in the process, exposing bone. Drawing his gun, Carl's pushed back by the opening door and sprawls backward into a stack of books, firing not one but two shots into the ceiling as he topples. Rick would be proud. Finally a third bullet hits the zombie's head, but it's only a glancing blow, and while the zombie falls, it soon recovers and comes crawling back.
By this time, of course, Carl's gun is empty, and he's reduced to dry-firing and kicking at the zombie while it clutches at him. Carl manages to escape into another bedroom and tries to get out through the window, but it's stuck and he can't get it open more than a few inches. Meanwhile the zombie forces its way grinning (?) into the room, and Carl has to get away from it again, back to the hallway. Lucky for him it wants to savor the anticipation of Carl's ankle before actually biting into it. Carl only gets away from it this time by leaving his boot behind, and then back in the hallway, he can't get the door closed at first because its blocked by all those books he knocked over a minute ago. He has to kick them all out of the way before he can shut the door and leave the thing rattling around in there, presumably unable to operate a doorknob. Carl picks up a handy piece of chalk from the floor and scrawls a message on the door. "Walker inside Got my shoe Didn't get me." It also got your last three bullets, champ. Carl has learned literally nothing, with the possible exception of how to get by in a world without Twitter.
So then Carl sits on the porch roof of that same house, eating the pudding straight out of the can, with his feet dangling over the eaves and the zombie reaching futilely out at him through the half-opened window. It's a precious moment, and one that could only be made more special if that window somehow gave way.
Michonne and her herd are still in the woods, when she finally gets tired of the presence of the zombie that looks like her, and she cuts its head in two. That's torn it, as her herd-mates belatedly realize she's not one of them and start converging on her. So Michonne keeps slashing, mowing down everything that moves, finishing with her new pets. When they're all dead in the grass, Michonne stands sobbing up at the sky. Issues, maybe.
And after the ads, Michonne returns to that muddy track, where the bootprints are still in evidence. Bright-eyed, and bushy-tailed, she follows them. So I guess she's made the choice between her pre-Rick life and her post-Rick life, then.
It's night at the Grimeses' current digs. Carl wakes up from where he's been propped up at Rick's feet, and looks over at Rick, who hasn't moved since Carl found him that way the morning. But that's about to change. Rick's arm starts twitching, and his breath wheezes in his chest…like that of someone with a punctured lung, or like that of a walker. Carl scootches across the floor on his butt in a panic, grabbing Rick's revolver. Because Carl used all his bullets, remember? Rick start moving, reaching for Carl and ending up spilling hard on the floor while Carl aims at his face. Carl is crying now, shakily holding the gun out in front of him while Rick reaches for it, until barrel and fingertips are inches apart like some perversion of the Creation of Adam. Rick collapses with his hand on Carl's foot as Carl drops the gun into his own lap, sobbing that he can't. "I was wrong. Just do it." Instead, Rick says Carl's name, and tells him, "Don't go outside…stay safe," before passing out again, flat on his back. Carl lifts Rick's head into his lap and says a few times that he's scared, but Rick's dead to the world again. But fortunately not undead to the world. Carl needs to get out of this habit of only speaking his mind when Rick is unconscious.
In the morning, Michonne finds the son and pop place that Rick and Carl found two days before, complete with the zombie Carl shot. She moves on, pausing only to glance at the note from the Joe Jr, on the floor, reading, "Please do what I couldn't." Apparently that strikes a chord in her as well, because she squats against the doorframe and delivers a whispered monologue. "Mike? I miss you. I missed you even when I was with you. Back at the camp. It wasn't you who did it. You were wrong. Because I'm still here. And you could be too. And he could be here. I know the answer. I know why." And with that, Michonne emerges from the restaurant, matter-of-factly prunes the head of a passing zombie head, and gets on her way.
Rick is now conscious and sitting up and telling Carl he shouldn't have risked going out. "I was careful," Carl lies. Rick's glad he found more food. He won't be glad when they inventory their ammo later, I bet. "I found even more, but I ate it," Carl confesses. Rick asks what it was, and Carl says it was "112 ounces of pudding." Rick chuckles and says he knows they'll never get back to how it used to be. You think? "I would have clung to that for you. For Judith. Now she's…gone. And you? You're a man, Carl. You're a man. I'm sorry." Carl says he doesn't need to be. Calling him a man made up for everything, I suppose, even though that is completely incorrect.
Michonne hits town and finds the empty pudding can in the middle of the street. Quietly beginning to draw her sword, she mounts the nearest porch, peeks in the window, and sees the Grimeses sitting companionable on the floor inside. Letting her sword drop back into her scabbard, she lets herself cry a moment, then offers a civilized knock on the front door. Rick and Carl get up off the floor, locked and loaded, but after peering through the peephole, Rick collapses on the couch, almost laughing. He tells Carl, "It's for you." Good idea. Let Carl be someone else's problem for 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.