If you have not seen this episode yet, do not read on, lots of spoilers ahead for episode 4x02
Most of the time I watch and type at the same time pausing when I need to, today I was eating my dinner when I sat down to write this, so I let it run until I finished eating... big mistake. The new show runner has really stepped up his game and seems to be as much a fan of the suspense and the gore as we are. I am now going to rewind those 8 mins and watch again from the start typing as I go! Warning not for the squeamish!
Previously... Farming, clustered walkers, Michonne's and her new family unit, Tyreese and Karen are starting something, Carol teaching knives, Glasses feels sick, Glasses dies!
Well, there seems to be some foul play afoot!! Someone within the camp is feeding the walkers a rat. I don't think it is a stretch to assume that this is not the first time this has happened. I guess that this probably is the reason that they are all gathering in one specific spot. This is rather grimm actually... the rat is being held up to the fence and when it sticks it's tiny little rat head through the walker bites it off!! Gobble gobble!
Karen and Tyreese are getting nasty in the prison library. Well... they are doing some kissing and it seems like Tyreese is having an epiphany about how people just die now. I wonder if he is going to be the camp faith leader! Karen is keeping her distance and won't let him get in her pants or spend the night together spooning. She walks off to the shower room... I am beginning to get the fear. Is glasses still in there. Her torch is on the blink, that is never a good sign. I am getting more nervous for her, but she is hard as nails... if she can survive The Guv'nor trying to gun her down she should be able to handle herself. There is a noise and it seems like there is nothing there, but as she walks off glasses rises from the dead!!
Glasses follows Karen back to D Block and is about to munch on her when he is distracted by a cough. Luckily it is no one that we know or care about since glasses bites him IN THE NECK!! He can't scream or warn anyone!! Shit... I don't like this.
Credits... Prison style!
This is both sickening and amazing at the same time. Glasses is rummaging around in mystery man's stomach having a good old snack on the organs! It is one of the bloodiest things we have been given in a while (or have I just forgotten it all on the break?) An alarm goes off, but luckily it is in C block as Rick has the baby and would have been rather shit defending the sleeping troops! Back to glasses and it is now light out so he must have been eating that guy for a while. He gets distracted by some more coughing far off... how many of them have coughs?!? In one of the most beautiful sights I have seen in a while the guy who was the meal, stands up and all of his guts fall out of his torso onto the floor... I really hope we get to see them trailing behind him on the ground!
Maggie and Glen are a really sweet couple, but shit guards. Maggie is sleeping in the guard tower and Glen is taking polaroids of her. I want to go back and see if this has all been shot like it is on a hand held camera or if there are any still shots. I wonder if the natural floatyness of the handheld (there is probably a technical term for it) is why I am feeling anxious. It brings you into the action more.
Michonne is going back out and has a little joke with Carl and Rick on the way out and tells them that she will look for some stuff that they like. Sweet she knows what they like without them having to ask!! Carl and Rick are farmers now, and I am beginning to agree with Carl that helping to take out some of the walkers before they break down the fence would be a good idea. Rick wants to plant cucumbers and doesn't want Carl going off on his own! Carl is trying to be a normal boy but asks when he can have his gun back.
Shots from the prison... Everyone jumps into action trying to find the source of the shooting and quickly clearing the blocks! They work out that is is not a breach, Michonne is heading back but only has Carl to open both sets of gates. This lets in some walkers that Michonne has to fight off. Carl gets a gun and shoots one, but only after Michonne trips on the ropes for the gates. I can see the glint of joy in his eye when he shoots the walker in the head... he missed it! It looks like Michonne has hurt her ankle, and the shots have brought a whole new set of walkers to the, already shaky, fence!
D block is a mess! Lots of people seem to have turned quickly (there were only 2 of them earlier) and there are walkers, children and screaming people everywhere. Rick grabs a gun, but promptly passes it back to someone else while he rounds people up to get them to safety checking they are not bit. Daryl saves a little boy and women's ovaries everywhere jump a beat (including mine). Nameless guy from the start gets an arrow to the eye from Daryl. Guy with half his face eaten gets most of his head chopped off by Glen. Carol rounds up more kids who apologise for forgetting the things she taught them (although it looks like the little girl could be talking to Karen). Glen delivers another machete to the head. Tyreese joins the party to hug Karen. Carol helps a guy with a bit to the arm into one of the cells and tells him she is going to have to cut off his arm now! She could do it from the elbow, but it looks like she is either going to chop it from the shoulder or she is checking him for more bites. She finds a bite at the back of his neck. Uh-oh! Looks like he's a gonner... just stab him now Carol. The wolf pack check the Block for Strays and Glen is nearly attacked but Daryl shoots the walker in the head. They recognise that it's glasses (fine... Patrick) and notice that all the walkers are people that they knew.
The guy who is a gonner is called Ryan and he asks Carol to look after his kids (I assume his kids) Lizzie and Mika when he dies. She agrees and tells him that he has to say goodbye to them. There is another walker locked in a cell with the droopy bleeding eyes. They manage to figure out that he died on his own and guess that it is a bad strain of flu which ends on the pressure in your lungs making you choke on your own blood. I love this crap... I am lapping it all up, I don't even care at this point if it is all complete nonsense or not. They work out that there is a walker at the fence like this and 2 dead animals in or close to the camp. At least they are drawing fast conclusions and it is not being drawn out like a mystery.
I live in Edinburgh and a basic history of my city is that when everyone lived so close together and on top of each other sickness spread so fast that they couldn't keep up with it. In they end they built over most of the original streets as this was where the peasants and lower classes lived, and where all the personal waste and rats were. You can still visit the streets below (known as the vaults) and they are said to be haunted, but as we all learned from history, when something like this starts to spread you are screwed to try and contain it in a small space (although this is much more space than in Edinburgh!!)
The girls say goodbye to their father, who is tied to the bed (glad to see they are learning). Lizzie tells Carol that she wants to be the one to kill him. She can't do it and if find it really sweet how the girls stick together to get each other through it. It makes me want to call my sister! Carol stabs him in the ear and it is done, nice and clean! Rick fills in Carl, Maggie and Michonne about the outbreak and tells them to keep their distance from all of those who have been exposed.
It's a real shame that they blew up the CDC in season 1, but we see, what I think is the council, meeting to discuss how to tackle this. Separate the exposed, but that is almost all of them, and those showing symptoms. They need to find a new block for them... shizz Karen is coughing. They want her to be quarantined off. They all get to work and Carol and Daryl share a few sweet words with each other. If Daryl dies from the flu I will be so pissed. If he ever has to die it better be noble and grand, not from flu!
Lizzie and Mika are outside, Carol comes out to tell them that they will be burying their father later. She then goes on tell them that she will protect them but they are weak. Nice Carol. Lizzie is crying over one of the walkers being dead and worried about one of the other walkers that she named. Mika seems to be totally switched on and tells Carol that Lizzie is not weak, just messed up!
Daryl is digging ditches and giving pep talks. He is telling Rick that it is good to have him back and that they need him. Rick is to concerned about Carl becoming a little psycho again though. Maggie starts freaking out that the fence is going to fall over. Man they are having a totally shitty day! They start stabbing the walkers through the fence. I feel that a lot of them stab then stand back for a second like they are choosing who to go for next. I would just be stabbing wildly at the next head, but maybe I just rush into everything too fast!
Michonne is getting some medical treatment from Beth while Judith plays. Beth is cold again and dosen't want to hear who is dead yet, she will get to it later when she has to put her sign back from 1 day to 0 days again! Beth is super wise, giving Michonne a pep talk telling her that people care about her and that they were not going to leave her just because she fell over. Beth talks about how there are widdows and orphans, but what do you call someone who loses a child. This with the echoed cries from Judith and Michonne chewing off half her face, I think we are supposed to guess that Michonne lost a child. Thanks for pointing it out show. I feel better now that I don't have to think for myself!
The team at the fence find the half eaten rats and deduce that the walkers are being fed. There is some weird jingly jazzy piano (?) music playing... no I don't like it! The fence is properly coming in now and one of the walkers literally cheese-wires his face against the fence! Eww... I love it! I think it is time for them to abandon this fence go back in and then get them from behind the other fence. That is just my suggestion or they will get trapped with a swarm! They hold it back for a while with their hands, but in the end Rick has a plan and asks Daryl to get the truck.
Carl is making some place holders for the graves when Carol comes in and they have a conversation about the knife class. There is some good character development here and we can tell that Carl is trying to mend the fractured relationship that he had with his dad at the end of last season. That is why he was freaked out when he saw Carol's teachings. I think he wants to be "good" and apologises to his dad when he shoots the walker and saves Michonne. He wants to tell his dad what he saw as he thinks it is lying not to tell him. Carol wants to teach the kids to survive. She clearly knows that what she is doing will not be seen as the right thing by some of the parents and so wants to keep it quiet. I think both of them want to do what they believe is right. In terms of characters I think this is my favourite scene and I could have talked about it more but reigned myself in!!
Yeah Michonne had a baby... it was clear with the crying and the hugging of Judith! Poor Michonne!
No... I just worked out that Rick's plan is to feed the Walkers with the piglets! I hope he kept a couple so that he can breed them again! What a waste of good food! I thought they were going to mow them down with Rick's nice plant spike on the front of the truck! How naive I was! Poor little piggies... farmer Rick looks sad!
Carl and Rick talk about staying away from Judith for a while, and Carl tells Rick about the weapons training for kids. He suggests that it is a good think and that Rick should not say anything to anyone. Rick agrees to this and gives Carl back his gun. Rick seems to have reached a turning point here with the pigs/piglets being sick and sacrificing them to the walkers. In his head he is probably realising that as much as he wants a normal life and to farm all day, it's not going to happen and the best way to live is to defend yourself. Rick burn his shirt... hello sailor (he did not look like that in Teachers) and the walkers are back at the perimeter fence!
Tyreese goes to visit Karen but only finds a trail of blood leading outside to some burned and charred bodies outside. I think he was trying to look a mixture of shocked and sad! Someone is properly messing with them from inside the prison, but burning the bodies is totally what they should be doing.
Walker death of the week: It may not have been dead, but the face being chopped pressed against the fence... nasty!!
Human death of the week: Karen since I bothered to learn her name and I hope that she was dead before she was burned!
Bitch of the week: Sorry, but Carol for asking Carl to lie (she can say she wasn't, but she was!).
Hero of the week: I think Beth for being so awesome and blunt.
Well there we have it, a plague of flu and a massive zombie sequence that has left me a little tired and emotionally drained! Should never have bothered to learn Karen's name... that will teach me!
As always you can get more from listening to the podcasts like I do at Baldmove.com and The Talking Dead.
Images from AMCTV.com
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