Walk With Me

Recapped by M. Giant · Aired 10-28-2012 · S03E03

There's nothing happening with the main group in the prison this week. Instead, Andrea, Michonne, and Michonne's two walker pets come upon the wreckage of a recently crashed Army helicopter, with two fatalities and one survivor. While checking it out, they come face to face with another search party, which includes none other than Daryl's long-lost brother Merle, now outfitted with a metal forearm complete with bayonet attachment. This despite Michonne coldly destroying her pets to avoid being discovered.

Anyway, they're brought to a compound which is actually a proper small town called Woodbury, where everything is safe and clean and proper. Of course there's no such place any more, let alone one that would take in Merle, so Andrea and especially Michonne have their suspicions. Okay, actually, Michonne just wants her sword back. But the leader of this little colony, who calls himself simply the Governor, assures them that the secret to this little community is just that: people with lives, and really big walls around them. Andrea is curious about how all this works, and we're curious about exactly how the governor is going to turn out to be evil. Which we'll be finding out soon enough.

The Governor also has some kind of scientist on his payroll by the name of Milton, who privately explains to him how Michonne's jawless, armless pets served as both camouflage and protection, but he wants to find out more. Michonne just wants out of there, but Andrea also wants to find out more, and Michonne isn't ready to leave without her. Ultimately, the governor quizzes the helicopter pilot to find out where he left the rest of his friends, promising to go get them. But with a party that includes Merle, the governor instead goes out, finds them, and kills them all so he can loot their equipment. So at least now we know how he keeps his men armed. As for why he turns out to also have a secret room full of zombie heads in fish tanks, though, that's probably going to have to wait for a later episode.

Okay, this is weird; there's a helicopter. And it's in the air. And it's manned by three soldiers in fatigues. Admittedly it's clearly been a while since their last inspection, but a functioning aircraft isn't something you'd expect to see ten months into the zombie apocalypse. But then we won't be seeing this one much longer either, as the chopper runs into mechanical difficulties, vomits cataracts of black smoke, and crashes into the treetops.

Walking along the road, Andrea, her katana-toting traveling companion Michonne, and Michonne's zombie pets spot the column of smoke rising from the trees in the distance and head off in that direction across a field, unmindful of the walker or two shambling along in their wake. Or not caring. Michonne has a samurai sword, after all. And also those pets, which will finally be explained later, along with the apparent disinterest of the walkers wandering by.

In addition to the previouslies from way back in the first season, reminding us of how Rick handcuffed Merle to a roof and went back later to find only Merle's severed hand, the new opening credits now include Michael Rooker. This makes me nervous, and I can't tell if it's in a good way or a bad way.

It takes the credits and the first ad break for Michonne's little party to reach the clearing containing the wreckage, and Andrea promptly pukes. Michonne chains her pets (which I've just now realized she's using as pack animals, which almost makes sense if you discount their absence of arms limiting the utility of backpacks -- the straps would keep slipping off their nonexistent shoulders) to a tree and goes ahead to check it out. The first body Michonne sees is that of one of the soldiers, who was apparently thrown clear just in time to be bisected by a rotor blade, now lying on the ground in two messy halves. She's just about to peek into the helicopter's cabin when she spots a couple of Land Rovers approaching and jogs back to their hiding place. They watch as a party climbs out and spreads out, dealing efficiently and quietly with a few approaching walkers before finding the chopper's pilot alive. A zombie walks right past Andrea and Michonne's hiding place, more interested in the activity ahead of it than the quiet, still women practically underfoot, and catches an arrow in the eye for its trouble. Andrea whispers to Michonne that since the new people are working to save the crash victims, they should reveal themselves, but Michonne prefers to wait. And then the cut-in-half man starts making noise, so the leader of the party -- a tall man with a deep voice that belies his baby face -- stabs him in the top of the head. He then does the same to the dead soldier still inside the helicopter.

By M. Giant

All this is making Michonne's pets restive, and their noise is starting to attract the attention of the rescue party, so she quietly beheads them. So much for the most interesting thing about Michonne. Not hearing anything further, the rescue party packs up and moves on. Looks like the coast is clear, but a noise behind them causes Michonne to begin to lift her sword, until a voice tells her to drop it and slowly turn around. The high, raspy voice behind them sounds like that of an old woman, but when they turn, it's none other than Daryl's long-lost brother Merle, saying to Andrea, "Ho-lee shit! Blondie! Damn, you look...good." Another walker has come up behind Merle, but Merle casually dispatches it with a bayonet strapped to the metal sleeve covering the stump of his right forearm. I guess his chainsaw's in the shop. With a gun in one hand and this bloody implement...ah, representing the other, Merle grins down at Andrea, "Now, howzabout a big hug for your old pal Merle?" Andrea goes with the only possible course of action, which is to pass out.

Andrea is slowly coming back to consciousness inside one of the Land Rovers, whose passengers also include Merle and Michonne. The vehicle is driving through the night past disturbing, half-seen sights like corpses hanging from trees, while the leader of the rescue party is on the CB to someone telling them they'll be at "the gate" in five minutes.

Later still, Andrea is being checked out by doctor in scrubs, who tells her she's not well enough to leave, plus it's dark. Oh, and there are also guards posted at the door. Andrea asks where they are. "That's not for me to say." the doctor says. That's not a warm and fuzzy thing to hear, but she promises Andrea, "He'll talk to you." Who? Enter Merle, who has removed his bayonet attachment for polite society and who now makes a big show of commanding the room and guessing that Andrea must have wondered if he was real, as though either of them was privy to Daryl's fever dreams of him last season. "I guess this old world gets a little smaller toward the end, huh?" he says wisely.

He says that until he was found, he was bleeding out, starving, and considering suicide to wait for Daryl. "You seen my brother?" he asks. "Not for a long time," Andrea says noncommittally, probably not sure yet if she can trust Merle or how much she should share. "Makes two of us," Merle says. Andrea tells Merle that Daryl and Rick went back for him and found him gone. "Not all of me," Merle chuckles, sliding off his armature so they can see his raw stump. Merle remembers Rick as "that prick that cuffed me to the rooftop," although I don't recall for sure whether Rick ever introduced himself to Merle as anything other than "Officer Friendly." Andrea explains how Daryl got over that whole mess, and runs down the list of people who died since -- Jim, Dale, Jacqui, Sophia, and Amy, her sister. "She was a good kid," Merle says, "I'm sorry to hear it." Who is this dude? He's been back for several minutes and has yet to say anything racist. Andrea tells Merle about the other deaths, and the farm, and the importance to the group of Daryl, whose fate she still doesn't know. She says they got separated seven or eight months ago and she got left behind. "I know what it feels like," she says. "I doubt that," Merle says, looking at his metal forearm. On the other hand, it was T-Dogg's fault both times, so I'm already looking forward to that reunion.

So now that they're all caught up, Andrea asks Merle what he wants, and Merle says to Michonne, "There she sits, four walls around her, roof over her head, medicine in her veins, she wants to know what I want from her." Basically, he wants a thank you. Michonne says he had a gun on them, and Merle chuckles, "Well, who ain't had a gun on them in the past year? I'd think I'd piss my pants if some stranger came walking up with his mitts in his pockets." Or waving a white flag, as the case may be. Andrea interrupts his rant with a thank you, and he takes it and crosses the room. The leader of the rescue party enters from a door near him and murmurs in Merle's ear for a moment, then asks the ladies how they're feeling. They're not open to his friendly attitude, though, wanting their weapons back and wondering why they're under guard. The tall man says he doesn't know them and needs to protect his people, and Andrea asks what the hell the deal was with stabbing dead men in the head. Right, Andrea doesn't have that memo, and neither does Michonne, apparently. "However we die, we all turn," the man tells them. "I put them out of their misery." As for Andrea and Michonne, he says they're guests, not prisoners, but if they want to leave they'll need to wait until morning, since they don't open the gate after dusk. He suggests Andrea get a good night sleep, anyway, still looking like death warmed over the way she still does, and then invites them over to his place the day on their way out to pick up extra ammo, supplies, and even a car if they want. He seems so nice for somebody who gives you the screaming heebie-jeebies.

They follow him out of the room as he steps out the front door of the building overlooking a town square so pristine it could be the cover of a Chamber of Commerce brochure. "Welcome to Woodbury," he says, causing me to wonder how they got all the way up north to an eastern suburb of St. Paul, Minnesota. Andrea looks out on a Norman Rockwell landscape lit with torches and braziers instead of street lights, and they follow the leader and Merle to the gate at the corner, which is constructed of a flatbed trucks that serve as both guard tower and fence, wedged in between the buildings on each side of the street to form a solid wall, save for a heavy gate installed between the two trucks. Guards with assault rifles are posted on the truck bed, looking out into the night, and Merle joins them.

Seeing this equipment and level of organization, Andrea asks, "Are you military?" He says most of them are self-trained, and the weapons she sees were mostly scavenged over time. And all the streets are guarded this way. "Got us a creeper, Governor," Merle calls down to the tall man. Andrea is a little surprised that people call their host that. "Some nicknames stick wither you want them to or not," the Governor says modestly, but Andrea knows the difference between a nickname and a title. Merle shoots down the incoming walkers with a silenced rifle -- three of them, to be exact -- and the Governor explains to Andrea that they'll get rid of them in the morning, before their odor "makes people uneasy." Andrea wonders who he's talking about in what looks like a ghost town, and without much further explanation, he leads them to where they're welcome to spend the night: a bedroom with food, clothes, and a hot shower. He's not giving them back their weapons just yet, though. Andrea asks about the helicopter pilot, but the Governor decides question time is over for now. He's got some Governing yet to do this evening, apparently. Andrea seems impressed with the setup, but Michonne scowls as she slams the door on the guard posted in the hallway outside.

The morning, the idyllic Main Street scene not only holds up, it's even more convincing, with people out on the streets going about their business like they're on The Truman Show. Andrea and Michonne are being shown around by some kind of guide with a clipboard, who tells them that they currently number 73 souls, soon to be 74. So much for the only thing that made Lori special in the post-apocalypse. She tells them the walls haven't been breached in over a month, and there have been no casualties inside since early winter. Andrea wonders how this is possible, and their guide explains the Governor's strict curfew and the perimeter and the limits on light and noise, but Andrea calls her on the dead zombie hanging from the tree. Their cruise director says something about the stress of guarding the town while claiming not to make any excuses, saying uncomfortably, "Everybody copes in their own way. But I'll raise it with the Governor." Be sure to let us know how that turns out.

At the hospital, or whatever building they're using for one here, the pilot's awake and being debriefed by the Governor, with the doctor in attendance. He tells the story of his National Guard post, where everything was going fine even after the plague hit, until someone got bit and the whole place collapsed within hours, forcing him and his men (about ten) to take what they could and get out. He says they got sixty miles and had to take the chopper off the truck they were towing it on to check things out. This all seems incredibly unlikely, but given the relative shortage of zombies in this episode compared to the rest of the season thus far, I suppose a helicopter crash was just what the doctor ordered. The Governor offers to go get the rest of his men, if the pilot will only tell him where they are. And indeed, why wouldn't he?

The Governor heads out, past a kid raking a lawn (nice note on how under control everything is, if yard maintenance is still on the to-do list) and goes down an alley and into a dimly lit lab. There's a nerdy younger scientist type named Milton working there, and also Merle, and they clearly hate each other. The Governor has to pacify a little spat between them before getting down to business. Merle explains how he knows Andrea (in terms that, as friendly as he was earlier, show he's still not over her minor role in his de-handing), and the Governor tells him to talk to her again and see what else he can find out. As Merle leaves, Milton shows the Governor the remains of Michonne's pets, which actually impress him. "Take away their arms so they can't grab ya, take away their jaws so they can't bite ya." Yes, we got that, but still. Milton goes on, "Take away their ability to eat, they lose interest in doing so. They're no longer in attack mode. We can be in their presence without threat. They become docile, in a sense." Still stinky and gross, though, and forever slowing your ass down. The Governor dubs this new breed of walker "lurker," and they figure Michonne must have kept them as both repellent and camouflage. "Walk with the biters, they think you're a biter," the Governor says, sticking his finger into the still-moving mouth of one of the severed heads. Milton explains that the pets were of course starving, just really slowly. Milton carefully brings up another subject, and the Governor assures him that he needs Milton to question his judgment sometimes (that, and Milton's tea). Milton suggests that maybe he'd be a better person to talk to Andrea and Michonne than Merle would be. Yeah, who wouldn't?

Cut to Milton and the Governor having breakfast with Andrea and Michonne in the Governor's kitchen. The hosts try to flatter the guests over how long they survived on their own, but Michonne's suspicious eyes are fixed on her sword behind the locked glass door of the Governor's weapons cabinet. The conversation drifts to the philosophical subject of whether the walkers retain any sense of their former humanity, which in turn leads to Milton asking Michonne about her pets, and his speculation that she knew them before. This at least gets Michonne's attention off the Governor's weapons cabinet. It's also obvious that this is the first time the question has occurred to Andrea, which is a little embarrassing for her. "Let them eat," the Governor says into the awkward silence. Andrea changes the subject to whether the place will hold up if a herd comes through, and asks him his secret. "Really big walls," the Governor says glibly.

Andrea points out that the soldiers they encountered also had walls, so the Governor elaborates that it's "about getting back to who we were. Who we really are." Thus they have homes and jobs and school and community. And guns and ammo, Milton points out. "And really big walls," Andrea remembers. The Governor vows die before he lets anything compromise their safety, as if anyone asked. "Looks like you're sitting pretty at the end of the world," Andrea says. The Governor says he's doing no such thing, and after deploying a preacher-worthy metaphor about how they've weathered the winter and now it's time to harvest, he says he's planning to go back out and take everything back. "We will rise again," he says in what is an uncharacteristically infelicitous choice of words. "Only this time we won't be eating each other," he adds. Oh, he meant to do that. After a long pause, Andrea agrees to drink to civilization.

There's a knock at the door. While the Governor goes to answer it, Milton asks how the tea is. There had better be some tea-related payoff in an upcoming episode. The Governor says he's got to go, and Michonne demands their weapons. The Governor offers to have them waiting for them outside, but invites them to stick around and see if they like what they see. Andrea seems open to it. Michonne, not so much.

Out on the street, Michonne grumbles to Andrea that she doesn't trust the Governor, so Andrea wonders if she's ever trusted anyone. "Yeah," Michonne answers all surly, leaving the "you" unspoken. Still, Andrea says she feels like she hardly knows Michonne at all. "You know enough," Michonne says, like saving someone's life means you don't have to undergo a background check or something. Andrea points out how easy it was for Michonne to take out the two walkers that had been protecting them all winter. Michonne says, "It was easier than you think." Not encouraging news, although I wouldn't go so far as to say Michonne would do the same to Andrea if necessary. It also leads me to suspect that while Michonne may not have known her pets before they turned, she might have known someone they killed. She walks away, but not without making some unfriendly eye contact with a big dude on the street who has noticed their presence.

The Army guys are camped out at a roadside pull-off when the Governor drives up in an unthreatening Nissan, waving a white flag out the open window. The solders remain suspicious, keeping their weapons leveled until the Governor tells them they found Wells, the pilot, alive. They're all relieved and happy to hear that their friend was found, and the Governor adds, "We found you too!" And then he pulls a gun and shoots one of the soldiers down, triggering a hail of gunfire from the surrounding bush that massacres the rest of the Guardsmen where they stand. Yeah, I was wondering how the Governor was going to turn out to be a bad guy, and here we are. The Governor takes a rifle off one of the dying men and uses it to smash his skull, just to underscore his ruthless methods while also making sure we're picking up on how Woodbury gets its weapons. The Governor even shoots one man in the back as he runs away, and tells one of his unhappy-looking minions (not Merle, although he's with them), "Go put a merciful end to that young man's days. Let's see what Uncle Sam brought us, shall we?" Yeah, he was totally a preacher.

Land rovers roll back into Woodbury, now with military transports as part of the convoy. Andrea watches as the Governor and Merle quietly confer with Milton on the street, and then the Governor gets up on the bed of one of the trucks to make a little speech to the assembled townspeople. The Governor explains that he promised the pilot that he'd bring his friends back alive. "But they didn't have our walls. Or our fences. The biters got there before we did." Convenient. He explains that the trucks had stuff they need. "We didn't know them, but we'll honor their sacrifice by not taking what we have here for granted." He tells them to head home before it gets dark and to look out for each other. So clearly, as evil as the Governor is, the whole town's not in on it. Andrea looks moved while Michonne sulks on someone's porch. The Governor notices Andrea's continued presence, and as they walk up the street together, she asks if there's anything she can do, but he's good for tonight. "Long day?" she asks, all friendly. "Haven't had many short ones lately," the Governor says. "Good night." Now that she figures she's got his guard down, Andrea asks him his real name, and he says, "I never tell." "Never say never," Andrea says, which is pretty weak sauce. He looks at her and insistently says, "Never." Now he's not even trying to get along.

That night, the Governor looks out his window over the town, then snaps the blinds shut. He walks past a woman asleep in his bed and to the fireplace mantel, where there's a picture of himself, his wife, and his daughter, neither of whom is the woman in his bed. Taking a key from around his neck, he unlocks a door and carries his drink into the room, which is a creepy little wood-paneled den where he sits and contemplates his drink. Oh, and also the twenty or so severed zombie heads floating in a pyramid of fish tanks against the opposite wall. One of which, at the top, once belonged to the helicopter pilot. That one doesn't look undead, just regular-dead. Aside from how his severed head is floating in a fish tank, that is.

By M. Giant

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.