By M. Giant
Rick takes Carl and Michonne on that run, but it's looking like an uneasy alliance. They visit Rick's old office to find the armory raided clean and, proceeding into town, find the main drag turned into a bizarre art installation of anti-zombie countermeasures presided over by a masked man with a sniper rifle. Gunplay ensues, and they manage to take the man alive. Guess who? It's Morgan from the pilot, who has turned his home into quite the bunker-slash-arsenal-slash-psycho wall in the past year. While he's unconscious and our "heroes" are raiding his stash, Rick finds the walkie-talkie he left Morgan all those years, its mate long since forgotten. Rick has an attack of conscience and insists they stick around until Morgan wakes up. While he's waiting, Carl and Michonne take a side run, ostensibly to shop for a crib for Lil Asskicker, but Carl's actually got another baby supply in mind. He and Michonne sneak into a zombie-infested restaurant so Carl can collect a family picture from over the bar, and they barely get out alive. But at least now Judith will know what her mom looked like, and Carl has a new friend.
When Morgan comes around, it isn't so much hugs and smiles as fighting and stabbing Rick in the shoulder. And then, when Morgan gets it together, he's pretty bitter about being abandoned by Rick. Worse, he reveals that his zombified wife was the one who got his son. So Rick hasn't really had such a bad time in comparison. Rick invites Morgan back to the prison with him, but Morgan doesn't want any part of it. But the away team gets back out of town with everything they came for, plus Michonne as an official member of the group. It's not such a good day for a guy they pass on the road, though.
The first thing we see is a post-apocalyptic social media message in the form of a hand-lettered sign overlooking the two-lane highway: "Erin, we tried for Stone Mountain. -J." Its eye-catching streamers rise in the breeze as the Hyundai cruises past with Michonne driving, Rick riding shotgun and Carl sitting behind him. It's silent in the car, even when they pass a lone backpacker who begs them to stop. Needless to say Michonne doesn't let up on the gas, and only Carl spares a look back at the man collapsing in despair on the pavement behind them.
Soon they arrive at one of those inconvenient road-blocking tableaux that speak of the early evacuation and panic, with cars packed with supplies and the odd set of gory remains stopped in the middle of the traffic lane. There's also an overturned truck off to the side with half of a moving walker sticking out from under it. Michonne, distracted by this as she's slowly trying to circumnavigate the mess, ends up getting a tire stuck in the muddy ditch. Rick and Carl just look at her impatiently as she spins their wheels, but soon there are zombies crowded around every window, snarling to get in. And of course one of them is still wearing an ID bracelet that spells "Erin," just as a bonus. Rick says, "Cover your ears," cracks his window, and pokes the end of his revolver's barrel into the face of the nearest ghoul.
Apparently he's able to clear out the whole group that way, because we cut to three travelers outside the car while Rick loots other vehicles for something to give the wheel traction. He also passes this important life skill on to Carl, who carps about Michonne in general. Carl is wondering why she's even along, and Rick explains that a) he didn't want to leave her back at the prison with Merle, and b) they have common interests. For now, at least. Michonne, sitting behind the wheel, hears every word of this, looking a little annoyed. Looks like she's going to have to save Hershel a few more times.
Speaking of uninvited guests, the man with the orange backpack comes running toward them from the direction they came, again begging them not to leave him. Michonne drives the car six inches out of the stuck spot, which of course you never do because you'll just get stuck again, but they all ride off, leaving the poor bastard not only still standing there, but totally knackered from having just run a mile or more. And in an area where there was just a lot of noise. Maybe get yourself moving again, orange backpack guy.
They drive into town -- not just a town, but Rick's hometown. All three of them hop out of the car. Someone's been getting creative with some graffiti tagging -- more on that graf -- but of greater concern is that when they enter the police station, the weapons locker has been picked clean. Rick's disappointment is almost explosive. He tells them this is the only cop shop in town, but they can check some local businesses he signed gun permits for. Michonne says that's not going to cut it, but he says it's the best they can do. "Do you have a problem with that approach?" he asks Michonne. "No, Rick, I don't have a problem," Michonne says reasonably, and hands him a single bullet she found on the floor. Rick figures maybe he's being an asshole, but that doesn't stop him from slipping the round into his shirt pocket.
There are other anomalous sights as they walk through town. A wall painted with the words "AWAY WITH YOU," a pile of burnt human corpses, arrows painted on the sidewalk pointing in the direction they're going, stuff like that. But it's just the warm-up. Coming around another corner emblazoned, "NO GUILT, YOU KNOW THAT," they reach the center of town, which is more or less the opposite of Woodbury. The main street is blocked with not only cars but homemade barricades bristling with sharpened stakes, ropes and barbed wire threaded all through it, a sign reading "JUST LISTEN," and all manner of small, caged animals at strategic points throughout.
They pick their way through, Rick ignoring Michonne's concerns that someone's obviously already claimed the place. A female zombie tries to follow them into the maze, and Michonne moves to take care of it, but Rick tells her to wait so they can watch it get caught. Which turns out to be a bad idea, because no sooner does the corpse-lady hit one of the lines than a bullet hits its head, courtesy of a masked man on a roof overlooking the street. "Hands!" the man bellows down at them, telling them to drop everything they have and go.
Rick isn't about to give up their weapons when they're on a weapons run, plus Michonne hisses that they need the rifle, too. Rick tells Carl to run for the car, and while the shooter is counting down from ten, she adds, "I think I can get up there." So Rick starts shooting. The masked man shoots back, but it turns out that his little art installation provide lots of cover for invaders who can actually move. While pinned down, Rick reloads with the bullet he got from Michonne and breaks cover to take the shot, but by this time the man is gone. Michonne appears on the roof, shrugging.
The gunman ends up appearing at street level, advancing on Rick in his riot gear, shooting all the way. Rick's about to jump out, but it's Carl who does so, jumping out of nowhere and taking down the man with a single shot to the chest at the last possible moment. Rick and Michonne both look at Carl with quiet shock and grudging respect. The kid's bagged his first human.
Rick checks the body and discovers that a Kevlar vest stopped the round, other than an angry bruise on the dark skin under it. And of course knocking the man out with a body blow, somehow. Rick says he's alive and when Michonne asks if they care, Rick pulls off the mask and says, "Yeah." I don't recap the previouslies, and tonight it's not just laziness -- if I'd told you about the clip from Season One of Rick talking to Morgan on his walkie-talkie, you'd know from the moment they walked into town exactly whom they'd be running into. And what do you know, here Morgan is. [Note: Between the previouslies and the mid-episode Talking Dead promos, it's almost like AMC wants to remove the element of surprise entirely. -- Rachel.]
Rick warns Michonne to look for booby traps. "Looks like he's gotten pretty creative so far," he understates. She wonders what happened to the original plan of getting in and out, but Rick refuses to leave Morgan on the street, angrily telling Michonne that Morgan saved his life. "He wasn't like this then." Rick suddenly remembers Morgan had a son, and starts to head inside the nearest building to look. He almost steps on a welcome mat, but Michonne hisses a warning, and instead he lifts it to find a pit full of spikes underneath that might as well have been placed there by Wile E. Coyote. He thanks Michonne, but she just wants to get Morgan inside and go.
They drag him up a stairwell topped with a sheet painted, "NOT SHITTING YOU." Before stepping through, Rick just barely stops Michonne from triggering a tripwire. I don't know how they dragged Morgan over it, but they get past the sheet, behind which is hanging a gore-covered axe waiting to swing out at the face of anyone either foolish or undead enough to come all the way up here. "Watch the wire," Rick calls back to Carl, in an ace bit of parenting.
They all end up in an upstairs room where guns are stacked in every available space and several unavailable ones. The walls seem to be covered with chalkboard paint, a fact Morgan has taken full advantage of with colorful, overlapping, semi-sensical notes to himself. Rick explains to Michonne that he showed Morgan the weapons locker last year, although even that accounts for less than half of what Morgan's accumulated in his arsenal. They flop him down on a cot, and Michonne and Carl get to work looting his weapons and ammo while Rick takes a look around. He seems to notice the notes on the wall for the first time, with the word CLEAR showing up repeatedly in the brightest, boldest letters among Morgan's stream-of-consciousness scrawlings. It gives him pause, but even he grabs a gun before pulling up short when he finds the two-way radio he left Morgan a year ago as his lifeline. Oh yeaaah, that. This seems to hit him hard, as does a big note reading "DUANE TURNED." I guess that clears up what happened to Morgan's son.
So he says they're going to wait until Morgan wakes up to make sure he's okay. "He tried to kill us and we didn't leave him for the walkers. He's had a good day," Michonne argues. Rick insists, even over Michonne's objections that Morgan is dangerous. But he splits the difference by zip-tying the unconscious man's hands together to his cot. While he's busy with that, Carl heads into the room, where most of a wall is taken up with a highly detailed map of the neighborhood. Carl can figuratively see their house from here, but Morgan has marked it "TAKEN," then crossed that off to amend, "BURNT OUT." Rick wonders if the reason Carl wanted to come was to see the house but he's being cagey. Rick doesn't pursue it, instead gets crabby listening to Michonne crunch on Morgan's food rations. "Mat said 'welcome,'" she deadpans. Carl announces that he's going on a run -- there's a baby place around the corner, and there probably wasn't much crib-looting, so they could probably pick one up for the baby. Michonne offers to help carry it, even though she can totally see he's actually up to something else, and Rick agrees, telling Carl to yell if he gets in trouble. He and Michonne head out together like the rock-solid allies they aren't.
Outside, passing a couple of walkers freshly impaled on one of Morgan's traps, Carl gets snotty with Michonne about how she doesn't need to come along. He sends her off to deal with a shirtless zombie and takes advantage of her brief distraction to slip around the corner without her. But she quickly catches up, even though Carl tells her he wants to go alone. "You just passed the baby place," she points out, and Carl tells her that she's getting something else for Judith first. If nothing else, she's curious enough to follow.
Rick waits for Morgan to wake up, unaware that he not only already has, he's also got a sheathed knife duct-taped to the frame of the cot, just three inches from where Rick "secured" his hands. While Rick peruses the note "EVERY ONE TURNS" and a weekly to-do-list on a support column before getting distracted with a rifle, Morgan hops up and comes at him with the knife. Rick bashes him to the floor with the rifle, urgently insisting that Morgan knows him. "People wearing dead people's faces!" Morgan rants, coming at him again. They grapple, Morgan ranting about how Rick doesn't "clear" until he manages to sink his knife into Rick's shoulder. Rick throws him off, bellowing, "You know me! You crazy son of a bitch!" He picks up his revolver and sticks it in Morgan's face. And Morgan's eyes light up as he begs Rick to kill him. Rick passes on the offer.
After the ads, we get to see one of Morgan's traps at work: basically it's a caged rat inside a nest of outward-facing spikes for the beasties to get impaled on trying to get at the animal inside. Up in Morgan's place, Rick has tied Morgan to a rickety freestanding gun rack so he can get shirtless and bandage up his own chest in the most unflattering way possible. Morgan is still begging Rick to kill him, and Rick reminds Morgan how he saved and fed Rick, and even gave him his orientation for the End of Western Civilization. But he doesn't seem to get through to Morgan until he shows him the radio and reminds him that he told him to turn it on at dawn every day. "Rick? I know you," Morgan says, suddenly lucid. Yes, Morgan, that's what Rick's been telling you. Loudly.
He remembers Rick's instructions, and says he hadn't "worked up to it," but when he did, Rick wasn't there. "Every morning, on the roof, every morning for days. For weeks, me and my boy. And then...me." He gets angry at Rick, yelling at him for not being there when he said he would be. Rick says he kept getting pushed father out, and had no choice. He found his wife and son and other people he had to keep safe. And yet it's still just a day trip back here? Never mind the gas they'd burn because apparently the zombie plague means vehicles never die either. [Note: That's what happens when your post-apocalyptic show gets sponsored by a car company.] Morgan bitterly kicks the radio over at Rick and asks if Lori turned. Rick says no, she died. "So you didn't have to see that then," Morgan grimaces. "Not like me, not like my wife." Rick remembers how Morgan's wife used to wander the streets with the other zombies at night, and Morgan suddenly remembers that Rick gave Morgan the gun to deal with her. Morgan realizes he was "supposed to," but he could never get to it. "Like there wasn't going to be a reckoning."
I think we all know where this is going, but Morgan tells the story of searching a cellar for food and coming out to find his zombified wife standing right in front of Duane -- who couldn't pull the trigger, either. Morgan called to him, and when he turned, there was nothing but red. "Finally, it was too late. I was supposed to. I was selfish. I was weak. You gave me the gun." Morgan asks if Carl is dead, and Rick says no. "No? He will be. See, 'cause people like you? The good people? They always die. And the bad people do too. But the weak people, the people like me, we have inherited the earth." Wow, Morgan is really elevating the acting on the show this week.
Rick takes this in, one of Morgan's "CLEAR"s practically glowing red on the wall in the background, not bothering to point out to Morgan that he's really not all that good a person. Just ask the guy with the orange backpack.
Carl and Michonne walk up to the King County Café, which looks like it might have been a local family dining establishment back in the day before such things were overrun by the mindless, undifferentiated hordes.... but enough about chain restaurants. Carl peeks in through the grimy windows and sees at least one dormant walker inside. Michonne stops him from turning the doorknob to enter, and he ends up having rather a fit about it. Michonne says she's trying to help, but Carl snots that she doesn't know him or Rick; they just have the same enemy and the same problem. "This is important. I'm going to do this. And I know how I can. You can't stop me." Michonne doesn't argue with that, but she points out that he can't stop her helping, either.
Cut to the inside of the café. The door opens, but at first, nothing comes in but a couple of rodents, rolled in on skateboards that their cages have been cleverly bungee-corded onto. All the former diners -- a good ten or twelve of them -- crawl on the floor concentrating on trying to get at the critters while Carl and Michonne sneak in unnoticed, mostly staying hidden behind a dividing wall. Carl peeks out at a framed photo hanging over the bar and climbs up to pull it down, unaware that one last zombie is just waking up on the floor out of sight behind the counter. That is, he's unaware until it grabs his ankle. Michonne quickly skewers it in the forehead, trying to keep the noise down so the others don't hear.
And it looks like they're going to get out of there, until one of the rats -- somehow freed but not eaten -- comes squeaking around the corner, with all of the walkers in pursuit. Obviously, they lose interest in the appetizer when they find themselves face to face with an entrée and an amuse-bouche in a stupid hat. Michonne and Carl try to retreat to the kitchen, but zombies are coming out of there too. Circling around, they manage to shoot and slash their way back to the front door and make it out... but the photo got dropped on the floor, and Carl wants to go back in. "It's the only one left!" he all but wails, after a very sloppy quick-cut. Michonne stops him, saying, "No more bullshit. You wait here. That's how we get it done."
She leaves him there holding the door, looking bored and impatient while the seething horde of undead slavers within, inches from his head, until she comes back around the corner of the building and hands him a photo of a much younger, cleaner, happier, more intact Grimes family. "I just thought Judith should know what her mom looked like," Carl says. "Thank you." Michonne says she was going back anyway, and reveals that she' also carrying a hideous, multicolored, papier-mâché cat. "It's just too damn gorgeous," she smiles. It'll certainly brighten up the prison. [Note: Wish we could have seen her fend off 12 walkers in one minute, but whatever, the cat thing was pretty awesome.]
Rick tells Morgan that he isn't going to kill him, but would rather bring him back with them, talking in terms of what's supposed to happen. Morgan doesn't get up from the gun rack Rick tied him to even when Rick cuts him loose, and Rick tells him about the prison. "Is that where your wife died?" Morgan asks, not particularly kindly. Morgan tells Rick to run for it, and can't help noticing that Rick is taking a lot of guns. Look who's talking, Army of One. But Morgan's point is that he's already figured out that Rick and his people have enemies. Rick just says, "We're gonna win. You can be there. You can help." Morgan insists, "You will be torn apart by teeth or bullets. You and your boy. Your people. But not me. Because I am not gonna watch that happen again." It starts to get heated again, with Rick trying to convince Morgan that he can come back from all this. "This can't be it. It can't be." Morgan almost seems to hear him for a moment, but he's still not budging. "I have to clear. That's why I didn't die today. That's the sign. I have to clear." Rick takes a sack of guns and goes, probably because all this talk of "clearing" is giving him, like me, the sinking feeling that the only religion to have survived the zombie apocalypse is Scientology. Besides, they can't have this guy around and making all the other actors look like slackers.
In the final act, Morgan is busy loading his freshly caught (and presumably even more freshly killed) zombies from his traps onto a gurney. Carl and Michonne show up to meet Rick, toting a floor display model crib, and Rick shrugs off the knife wound when Carl gives it a look. Michonne takes one of the bags of guns Rick was toting, and gets thanked for the third time this episode. Walking back toward where they parked their car past a very busy Morgan (who of course isn't bothering with the mask now that his identity has been revealed), Michonne asks if he's okay. "No, he's not," Rick answers uninformatively. Carl pauses, and despite Rick's warning words, tells Morgan that he's sorry he had to shoot him. Morgan steps toward him, a bit too intensely, and says, "Hey, son. Don't ever be sorry." With that, he gets back to work, and the travelers head back to their car.
As they load it up, Rick privately asks Carl if everything was okay with Michonne. "Think she might be one of us," Carl answers. He gets in, and Rick looks thoughtful until Michonne joins him behind the car. I notice she's got a new crossbow slung across her back for Daryl, so he'll be glad to see her again. Noticing his dreamy expression, she asks, "You see something?" because she knows about his hallucinations. "I used to talk to my dead boyfriend," she volunteers. "It happens." Rick offers to let her drive, and when she accepts, he cracks, "Good. I see things." So things are actually working out for them in an episode for once, even if it's only the three of them. I guess no one else was in it because there wasn't enough good luck to go around.
Driving out of town, they pass the "Away With You" sign and Morgan at work beyond it, prepping new bodies for the pyre. I don't know how he got ahead of them, but if he can move this fast, no wonder he's been so productive.
On the road back to the prison, just past the mess they got stuck in earlier (Michonne wisely drives around on the other side this time), they pass a big, long, red splash on the shoulder of the road, with a large, inert pile of meat in the middle of it. Now they slow down, but only so Michonne can back up enough for Rick to reach out of the car door and snag the orange backpack. So they scored some extra supplies without having to add another mouth to feed? Just when I thought their day couldn't get any better.
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.