First of all, a big "fuck you" to AMC for the
inexplicable eleven week gap between episodes seven and eight. Eleven weeks!
What the fuck were they thinking? I know that some series have a hiatus of a
couple of weeks over Christmas but this was ridiculous. So, fuck you AMC.
When we last saw Rick & Co., Shane had torn the barn
doors open and walkers had come streaming out. One by one they had been put
down until only one remained: a small figure, emerging slowly from the barn. It
was Sophia. Some may have seen it coming, but I didn't. The final moment of the
episode was Rick shooting Sophia in the head and it's the first moment of this
episode too.
After the inevitable confrontation between the two groups,
it becomes clear that this episode is about grief. Characters respond in
different ways, displaying all of the Five Stages of Grief: denial, anger,
bargaining, depression and acceptance. Some react quite simply. Carl is
relaxed, his grief having passed quickly into acceptance as he tells his mom
that it was the right thing to do, that he would have done the same.
Shane and Daryl both react with anger, but for different
reasons. Shane is still angry with Hershel for hiding the walkers from them,
convinced that they knew Sophia was in there. He takes his anger out on both
Rick and Dale. Daryl explodes with rage when Lori calls him selfish for
refusing to go into town to get Rick and Glenn to come back, telling her that
he did more than anyone to look for Sophia, taking a bullet and an arrow for
his trouble. Although they both react with anger, they do so for different
reasons. Shane's anger comes from his guilt over killing Otis and from his
frustration with Rick, who he believes to be an incompetent leader. Daryl's
anger comes from his guilt at not being able to find Sofia and from his resentment
at being unappreciated. Carol's reaction is a much quieter one
than Shane and Daryl's. She wanders off into the woods and tears up a bush,
emerging later in an almost catatonic state and has a quiet moment with Shane,
who apologises for opening the barn and ultimately being responsible for
Sofia's death.
Maggie responds to her grief by bargaining with Glenn. Twice
she asks him what will happen next but he has no more idea than she does. When
he hints that he will leave if the others do, she becomes determined to keep
him around. When he leaves to go into town with Rick, she tells him she loves
him. Glenn tells Rick that he had no idea what to say and that he didn't
understand why she did it. "We're practically strangers", he adds.
After the massacre is over, Hershel orders Rick to get off
his farm and then leaves, heading, it's revealed later, to the bar in town.
Once Rick and Glenn get there, he reveals that he has been living in denial.
When Rick appeared with his son and when Shane returned alive with the
equipment he needed to save Carl, he was convinced that they were
"miracles" and that a cure would be found. He is angry and
disappointed with himself for refusing to accept the truth, that he was doing
nothing more than feeding his wife's corpse. Depressed, he turned back to drink
for the first time in over two decades. Slowly, Rick convinces him to come back
to the farm and help Beth (Emily Kinney), who has fallen suddenly ill.
The final scene is the best of the episode. As Rick, Glenn
and Hershel are preparing to leave, two men, Dave (Aaron
Munoz) and Tony (Michael Raymond-James, better known as Rene from True
Blood) walk
into the bar. Together, the five men share a drink and swap stories of
so-called safe havens that turned out not to be so. When Rick tells them their
ultimate destination is Fort Benning, Tony tells him the place is overrun. They
suggest Nebraska - sparsely populated and full of guns. The two strangers then
start questioning the three over where they live and things get uncomfortable.
It's an amazing ending to a very good first episode back.
The first half of the series was criticised for moving too
slowly. I never agreed with that analysis. This isn't the serialisation of Zombieland,
it's a drama about loss, grief, family and betrayal and it just happens to
feature zombies. This episode shows just how well it can be done: great moments
of drama punctuated by hilarious moments of the macabre, like Andrea stopping
to pick up an arm that has fallen off the back of a truck-load of dead zombies.
8 out of 10.
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