Things are going pretty well at the prison these days. Rick has not only abdicated leadership, he's beaten his service revolver into a garden hoe. And that's only one of the signs that the influx of Woodburians (and others) has led to a more stable, peaceful community. Daryl and Carol's flirting has escalated even as Daryl becomes a local celebrity, Tyreese is with Karen, Glenn and Maggie are obliquely talking pregnancy, and Beth has a new boyfriend named Zach. In short, everyone is, as predicted, so much better off without Andrea. But there are still errands to be run outside the fences that continue to swarm with walkers; otherwise there wouldn't be a whole lot happening. At first.
For starters, Daryl leads an expedition to a "Big Spot" department store that has been carefully cleared out -- but alas, not cleared off, as the roof has sustained damage from a crashed helicopter that is surrounded by walkers. And when a thirsty newbie triggers a mishap that leads to further roof failure, they all learn how quickly a simple supply run can be ruined by something as minor as zombies raining down from on high. Most of the group makes it out alive, except for Beth's boyfriend Zach. Don't worry, Beth takes it pretty well. Or maybe we should worry about how well she takes it.
Rick also has to venture out to clear the animal traps he's laid in the woods, and is unlucky enough to encounter a Sliding Doors version of himself out there. After all of his efforts to reel both himself and Carl back from the moral brink they teetered on last season, a woman who has kept her zombified husband unalive at their campsite for who knows how long is the last person he needs to meet. Especially when she talks about how you can't come back from the things you've done to survive. And then she kills herself to be with her walker husband, so I think we can consider Rick's day ruined.
Not that the interior of the prison is entirely without drama. Michonne is planning to trek to Macon, which I'm sure will go totally smoothly. Some of the other kids have taken to naming the walkers who are pressed against the fences, to which Carl objects. Carl also crashes "story time," only to discover Carol teaching the kiddies how to defend themselves with knives. Furthermore, a mysteriously ailing pig in the livestock pen is an ill omen, especially when it dies. But when a mysteriously ailing human named Patrick dies alone inside the prison and almost immediately gets back up again, that's no omen: that's a bomb about to go off. Which it no doubt will week.
Rick exits the prison into the yard -- which has not only been thoroughly cleaned, but now features some cheery potted plants -- splashes his bearded face from a handy rain barrel, and heads out toward the zombie-lined fence, where he gets to work with a hoe. And not to kill zombies, but to scrape up the dirt in what is now a garden. He's found a functioning iPod and earbuds somewhere, so the soundtrack for the scene is the country-music moldy oldie playing in his head as he works the soil, ignoring the now-boring horrors behind him. Then his hoe hits something hard, and he kneels to unearth a buried automatic handgun. He pulls out one earbud, allowing the sound of the slavering zombies to invade the sonic landscape. He looks up at them for the first time this morning, focusing on one bloody-eyed specimen in particular, then replaces the earbud, ejects the gun's clip, and tosses weapon and ammo into the wheelbarrow separately. So it looks like someone at least thinks he's done killing zombies.
After the credits, Carl comes out to join Rick. Seems Rick let him sleep in, "because I knew you were up all night reading comics with a flashlight." Where is their battery hookup in the zombie apocalypse all of a sudden, anyway? They lean over the low fence of a recently constructed animal pen, where a pig seems to be crashed out in the corner. "What's up with Violet?" Carl asks, though Rick has told him not to name the food. And Rick doesn't know anyway, so all he can think to do is say, "Feel better…Violet."
A bit later in the morning, the rest of the prison appears to be awake and at their morning activities in the yard; Daryl, whose hair looks worse than ever, strides through the yard being treated like a celebrity. "Just so you know, I liked you first," Carol tweaks him when he joins her at an outdoor cooking station to get his breakfast. He modestly says that Rick brought in a lot of these people too, and she points out that Rick hasn't done much of that lately. So between saving people and bringing in food, "You're gonna have to learn to live with the love." She leaves the kitchen in the charge of a nerdy, bespectacled teen named Patrick, who sucks up to Daryl a bit, and asks for a handshake .He doesn't even mind when Daryl licks his fingers before putting 'er there.
At the fence, some of the residents -- including Karen, the sole Woodburian survivor of the Governor's little tantrum spree at the end of last season -- are trying to thin the crowd of zombies outside by poking various tools through the chain-link and through the walkers' rotting faces. More are coming, and though it's not enough to be a threat, I don't know how they clear out the re-dead ones. Carol leads Daryl out to where they can see the situation, saying that with today's build-up, they may not be able to spare many people for the run he's planning today. "Sorry, Pookie," she says. And the fence-cleaning continues, grossly.
Glenn & Maggie are having a bit of a lie-in, looks like. Glenn sits up and tells her, "I don't think you should go today." Something is clearly on his mind, and although she gives him some bucking up, she reluctantly agrees to stay.
Tyreese joins Karen at the fence, and when she notices that he's not wearing an apron like the rest of the people on this nasty, nasty detail, he says he's thinking about joining the crew for Daryl's run instead. He explains how he can't deal with the fence work anymore. "You always volunteered to do it," She points out, which he says is because he wanted to get to know her. She kisses him, so it clearly worked. And now they're apparently in the stage of the relationship where he doesn't feel the need to impress her all the time.
Daryl is loading up a pickup with a kid played by Beaver from Veronica Mars, and Beth comes up for a quick kiss. He tells her that he's joining the run and wanted to let her know because of how he's doing this dangerous, heroic thing, though he also wants her to think he thinks it's no big deal. She's fine with it, and doesn't even want to say goodbye. Daryl compares the scene to a romance novel, which means he either didn't hear what just went on or never read any romance novels.
While Sasha and Tyreese are loading up the Hyundai, another newcomer named Bob comes up, asking Sasha for permission to come along. He's only been here a week, apparently, and Sasha isn't sure he's a team player. Glenn points out that Bob was an army medic, and Sasha eventually gives in. What could go wrong?
Hershel's now out in the garden with Rick, giving not-at-all-symbolic tips on how to break off parts of a plant that won't produce. The good news is that they can be repurposed. Like I said, not at all symbolic. Hearing a whistle, Rick leads Carl at a run to open the front gate for Michonne, who is arriving at a run on horseback. Notice that the area just outside the gate has been fortified by some of the type of spiky zombie traps that Morgan had set up in "Clear," because the first casualty of the zombie apocalypse is the U.S. Patent Office. Both Grimeses are happy to see Michonne, who presents an excited Carl with a stash of found comics from her saddlebag. "I get to read 'em when you're done," she says. She also has something for Rick: an electric razor. "Your face is losing the war," she cracks. Well, I'm sure it's worth a few extra drops of generator fuel to make him smooth and kissable again. Rick wonders if she's staying a while this time, and she's noncommittal. The three of them almost seem like a family unit, to the extent such things still exist these days.
The away team rolls up from the inner yard with Daryl in the lead on his chopper, and after some brief greetings during which Michonne tells Daryl she didn't find "him" (the Governor, I'm guessing), she says something about checking near Macon. Neither Rick nor Daryl seems entirely supportive of her plan, given the potential dangers of the 70-mile trek. In any case, Daryl's off on his run, Michonne decides on the spur of the moment to join them, and Rick says he's off to check the animal traps before the walkers get whatever they might have caught. But he tells Carl to stay back and maybe do some kid stuff, like hang out with Patrick or check out "story time." Carl points out that's for kids, which Rick agrees with -- in fact, that kind of seems to be his point.
Hershel walks up on what must be a prosthetic leg, given that he's no longer using crutches or even a cane, and makes a crack about Rick needing some overalls if he's going to be doing the farmer thing. "Piece of wheat out the corner of your mouth, maybe a bigger ass." Then he gets to the point, which is that the rest of the "council" -- Daryl, Glenn, Carol, Sasha and himself -- are insisting Rick take his gun when he goes outside the fence. Rick resists the idea, but Hershel insists.
Outside the fence, Rick is equipped with a few game sacks as well as the old service revolver on his hip. The first trap he comes to has a ripped-up, flyblown deer, so that's probably not going to be a tasty treat sensation for anyone. Moving on, he finds a wild boar lying on its side, but ducks behind a tree when a filthy, desperate figure shambles up and falls on its knees before it. Rick's about to leave it to the walker, until it calls out, "Wait! Please!" So not a walker, then. Just a very dirty lady. "Please help me," she begs. A very, very dirty lady.
After the ads, the woman begs Rick in an Irish accent to help her get the pig to her husband. "We haven't eaten in days," she says. We all remember how Rick blatantly ignored that backpacking hitchhiker in "Clear" until there was nothing left of him but his backpack. But after a pause, this new improved Rick reaches into his bag to hand the woman a foil-wrapped food packet that almost looks as though it came from a nearby Chipotle. She asks if he has a camp nearby and if they could come back with him. "We've been doin' very badly on our own," she admits. Rick says he'll need to meet her husband and ask them both three questions first. It's actually going to be a total of four, because first he wants to make sure she doesn't have a gun. He does find a sad little knife on her, and threatens that if she tries anything, she'll lose. "I don't have anything else to lose," she says, but Rick says she does. But only because he just gave her knife back to her.
Back at the prison, near an area of the fence where nobody is clearing any walkers, Carl and Patrick come across four other preteens who are talking to the walkers on the other side of the dog run as though they're visiting them in a zoo, calling them by names and everything. Carl points out that dead people don't get names, but one of the girls says that these people aren't dead, they're just different. Because we all know how kids that age are into political correctness. "People kill people, they still have names," the girl points out. Carl insists, "They're not people and they're not pets. Don't. Name. Them." The girl leads the others off to story time, but not before one of them outs Patrick as a regular attendee. "You wouldn't dig it, it's for kids," Patrick tells Carl, and heads off, saying he'll meet Carl later.
The away team (Daryl, Glenn, Michonne, Tyreese, Sasha, Zach and Bob) has arrived at an off-brand department store called the Big Spot, whose parking lot was sealed in by chain-link early in the plague to create a sort of makeshift refugee compound. Which obviously didn't hold up, and when our group first found it there were walkers inside the fence like guard dogs. Now there are none in sight, because there's a boom box off in the distance that Glenn hooked up to two car batteries, making enough noise to draw them all off. Don't ask me how you hook up a boom box to two car batteries without frying it.
The group heads inside a tear in the fence, weapons at the ready. Daryl says this is just a sweep to make sure it's safe and to grab what they can, and they'll come back tomorrow with more people. Which makes no sense, because more people means less room for stuff in the vehicles, plus greater numbers are unnecessary if it actually is safe. Whatever. They all head in past the Army tents and jeeps and overturned supplies and the odd corpse to the store itself, where Daryl bangs on a window and says, "Just give it a second." Zach decides it's time for another turn of his once-daily game, "What Did Daryl Do Before All This," and guesses that based on Daryl's helpful yet "kinda surly" manner, he was a homicide cop. This cracks up Michonne, and Daryl plays along just enough to make Zach realize he's going to have to guess again tomorrow. By now, the few zombies inside have reached the front of the store and Michonne asks, "We gonna do this, Detective?" Sasha gives everyone instructions before they head in to clear out the place, and Tyreese asks if she was ever not the boss of him. "Yeah, the few years before I was born," she says, and most head inside, with Bob bringing up the rear. And from Bob, a crane shot rises up to reveal that the roof, the roof, the roof is crawling with zombies -- as well as an army helicopter that crashed at some point and no doubt weakened the structure. Don't ask me how all those walkers got up there in the first place; the helicopter isn't anywhere near that big.
Rick's dirty new friend leads him through the woods, telling him the story of how she and her husband were traveling to Puerto Vallarta for their honeymoon when the airport shutdown put the kibosh on their connecting flight out of Atlanta. I'm a little embarrassed to realize that I never considered the implications of the gang being so near an international air travel hub. In any case, the newlyweds slept under the giant marble sculptures there for four nights, until the zombies came through. A group that was once much larger is now down to just her and Eddie, and she tells Rick that she wouldn't have made it without him. And not just by saving her or by showing her what she had to be willing to do, either. Rick asks for more details on that last thing, so she explains about the stuff they had to eat, and having to leave people behind, and "hiding from people who needed my help. Unlike you." Well, unlike Today-Rick, to be more accurate.
Inside the darkened store, Michonne slashes down a monster-themed stand-up display that's in pretty bad taste under the circumstances. Glenn's in electronics, where a display advertising baby portraits doesn't seem to improve his sour mood. Bob wheels a cart through the liquor section, shaking his head like he knows better, but he stops near a spot where the ceiling is dripping, and picks up a bottle of wine. He's about to stash it furtively in his bag, but thinks better of it and puts it back on the shelf. I think we've just learned that Bob has fought not just undead monsters, but the demon rum as well. Unfortunately, the shelf he just touched is damp and rotten enough to collapse, dumping out the entire contents of the shelf and every shelf below it. So the whole unit, now top-heavy, tips over on him. Really loudly, too, which attracts the attention of the walkers on the roof. They start converging on the damaged area, which is already looking ready to collapse. Daryl, Tyreese and Zach start lifting the shelf off of Bob to free him, still unaware of the danger from on high. Tyreese is just telling Bob how lucky he is when the first zombie falls through the roof and passes clear through the acoustic tile ceiling. Unfortunately for it, its intestines got caught on something on the way down and it hangs there like a parachutist tangled in a tree… or a sprinkler that puts out fires with spoiled blood. "Uh, yeah, we should probably go now," Glenn understates.
On the other hand, there's still Bob to be freed. On the other other hand, zombies seem to be finding every weak spot in the roof and crashing right through into the store below, all around our heroes. One of them splatters on the floor like the world's most disgusting water balloon, but way too many of them are landing intact and ready to rock and roll. Walkers were bad enough, but these fallers suck.
Out in the woods, Rick is trying to steer the conversation back to the safer subject of the marble sculptures at the airport, but now it's his new friend who wants to know if Rick ever did things like she and her husband had to. "Do you think you get to come back from 'em?" she wonders. Rick hopes, so, and she just hopes he likes their answers to his three questions. I just hope the first two questions are "WHAT is your name?" and "WHAT is your quest?"
Zombies are still plummeting down into the Big Spot and attacking our heroes. The upside is that the sunlight pouring in through the holes being punched in the ceiling makes it easier to see. A couple of them pin down Glenn, but the partial riot gear he's wearing is able to deflect their teeth until he's able to reach his gun, shoot one and pistol-whip the other. Tyreese manages to actually shoot one, possibly for the first time ever, but then he misses more and is soon disarmed. Sasha empties her machine gun, and then grabs a garden implement to join Michonne in hacking down the attackers. Daryl uses his crossbow on the creatures as both a projectile weapon and a blunt instrument. Through it all, Bob is still trapped under the shelves as a zombie crawls towards him. Daryl claims some high ground on a pyramid of beer cases near where the first walker fell and makes a stand there, until Glenn rushes in shooting and sees the helicopter beginning to blot out the sun again as it shifts overhead. Bob is reduced to blocking the progress of the zombie crawling at him by bracing his free hand against its forehead, which only works until its scalp starts slipping loose. But then Daryl drags it away and stomps its skull like a glass at a Jewish wedding. Zach puts his back against the shelf that trapped Bob and lifts it enough for the others to drag Bob out, but a zombie crawls out after Bob and takes a big bite out of Zach's leg, then makes a meal of Zach's neck before anyone can react. That's it for Zach -- even if the helicopter didn't just fall into the store moments after everyone else runs out of the way. Which it does. At least most of the zombies are probably out of the picture now, too.
Rick's new friend has finally led him to her campsite, where there's a tent set up with sleeping bags inside. Not that anyone's in either of them. She tells Eddie -- who isn't actually in sight -- that Rick's here to help, then runs at him waving a much bigger knife than the one she had before. Rick easily matadors her to the ground and has his gun aimed at her by the time she looks up. She sobs that she wanted to take the boar, but she knew she'd get Rick to the campsite quicker. "He's starving!" she says. "He's slowing, he needs something alive." So I guess her husband is no longer Eddie, but Deaddie. She explains that she couldn't be without him, so she kept him, though she knows it was wrong. "I can't do things like this," she says, "and you have to do things like this. Let me be like him. Don't stop it. Don't end it after." Rick shouts at her to stop, but she turns the knife on herself and sinks it into her own belly. Rick looks completely wrecked as he holsters his gun, but manages to kneel down to give her a few last moments of comfort. She asks what the three questions were. "How many walkers have you killed?" is the first one. She says Eddie did all that for them. The second is "How many people have you killed?" "Just me," she answers. And the final question: "Why?" Her halting answer, spoken with her final breaths: "You don't get to come back from things." So that's a day-brightener for Rick. He goes off and leaves the dead woman, and the weakly moving bundle under some dirty burlap. So that ought to be about it for the gang from the Atlanta airport, wouldn't you say? At least until they show up again at the fence some time in the future.
Carol is reading to the kiddies in what I assume is the prison library. Most of the kids are sitting on the floor, aside from Patrick, who's in a wooden chair. And Carl, who is sneaking in for some reason, probably not wanting to be seen because he's so much cooler than all this. There's also an adult watching over it all, but at some point he gets bored and takes off. And the moment he's out of the room, Carol closes the book in mid-sentence and gets up off the chest she's been sitting on. A kid named Luke offers to take watch, and after taking him up on it, Carol reveals that the chest contains a collection of knives, and she's about to teach the kids "how to use them, how to be safe with them and how they can save your life." And probably not by making sushi. Patrick asks to be excused, pleading illness, and when Carol advises him to tough it out, he says, "I don't want to yack on somebody." Carol doesn't want that either, so Patrick takes off. She gets back to the subject at hand, namely promising to teach the kiddies holding and stabbing and slashing and aiming. Just then is when Carl shows himself. Carol asks him not to tell Rick, but Carl just shakes his head and storms out, promising nothing.
Rick's back inside the prison fence and as he's on his way to slop the hogs, he pauses for a look at the same bloody-eyed zombie he saw that morning. And there's a differently unpleasant sight waiting for him at the peg pen: Violet has given up the ghost and now lies dead in the mud. Rick looks devastated at this tragic waste of bacon.
That night, Tyreese visits Karen in her (or their) cell, and she can tell he's upset. "I don't like going out there either," he says. Well, there's just no pleasing some people.
Glenn's back with Maggie, and he tells her that Daryl's going to break the news to Beth about her now-dead boyfriend. Maggie decides to go see her, but she pauses in the doorway to say she's not pregnant. Glenn is a little more relieved than Maggie might have hoped under different circumstances. "I didn't want to, but we could have," she says. "We can have lives here." Glenn wonders how she can say that after everything that's happened, and she says she doesn't want to be afraid of being alive. Glenn says being afraid has kept them alive. "No, it's how we've kept breathing," she says. Deep.
Beth's writing in her journal on her bunk -- like any normal teen girl who lives in a prison during the zombie apocalypse -- when Daryl shows up at her door. He can't bring himself to actually say that Zach is dead, but she gets the message. "Okay," she says, sitting up and looking sad for a moment. Then she gets up and goes to a board she has up in her cell and removes the 3 from the sign that until just a moment ago read "30 Days Without an Accident." She notices the way Daryl's looking at her, and explains patiently that she doesn't cry anymore. "I'm just glad I got to know him, you know?" Daryl agrees, and then she asks if he's okay. "Just tired of losing people, is all," he says. And she gives him a comforting hug, saying she's glad she didn't say goodbye to Zach. "I hate goodbyes." Daryl agrees with that too.