Yeah. I was thinking exactly the same thing. Then outside in the morning it looks like a tornado went through, just missing the barn and destroying the walkers.

 

How did the walkers find them in the first place.

 

OK, admittedly I'm not exactly a country gal.

But I would have thought that if a barn is hanging around then there must be a house associated with it. Like, people build barns within convenient location of their house. They don't build barns miles away from their house, mostly they build barns within walking distance of their house so that all their tools and livestock and feed and shit they keep in the barn are within a conveniently accessible distance from their house.

So why didn't they look for the house and hole up in the house?

 

Are we talking about Maggies dream or am I missing something?

 

Yeah we're talking about the really obvious dream.

 

Seemed like a dream sequence to me. Except for all the fallen trees.

Also, why would a herd suddenly attack a barn?

A windstorm storm strong enough to knock down trees would have knocked over a barn as well. Or lifted it into a whole other world.

 

Someone who had a large expanse of land or owned property separate from the property their house was on, might have an isolated barn. Driving through western NY countryside, I find it not uncommon to come across a random structure like a barn, with no obvious house in sight. Even if a house was within a quarter of a mile of that barn, they wouldn't know which direction. And a house would be more likely to have a few walkers that needed to be cleared. I think its realistic that if they knew the exact location of a barn, they would just head straight there during a downpour rather than search for a house.

But what I do find unrealistic, is that the herd at the barn door somewhere resolved itself. I think we are suppose to believe that they got scattered by the wind, and then trees fell on all of them. Obviously contrived.

 

Yeah, driving around rural Australia you do come across remote constructions that are plonked in the middle of nowhere with no apparent rhyme or reason.

Now I'm intrigued by the Brit contingents suggestion that the whole zombie barn scene was Maggie's dream. Possible?

 

About as possible as the entire show being Rick's dream.

 

I chalked it up to them all being physically and mentally exhausted. There was time skip. They managed to hold the doors closed until the walker herd finally gave up and/or succumbed to the storm. The group then collapsed from exhaustion and fell asleep.

 

I had a real problem with that too. Also when you have your group facing such a huge challenge as a small herd at the barn door then you want to see them actually do something to get themselves out of it. Even if everyone had held them back and Michonne started running her sword through the crack in the doors and took them down, one by one it would've been better. Just having everyone wake up in the morning to walk among that wreckage was poorly done. It would've been better if they just didn't add walkers into that mix and had them concerned about the barn collapsing in a storm, since this is the first time they've really faced a significant weather threat anyway.

 

That wasn't a dream sequence. Evidence for it being real was all over the place in the morning. Also, just before they stopped the sequence of everyone holding the door shut, they had a change in the way the wind sounded, which to me was evidence of straight-line winds or a tornado going close by. I've had that happen before and it gives off kind of a screamy noise, which is what they had on the show last night. And tornadoes can completely destroy one house while leaving a neighboring house completely unscathed, so it's possible.

 

I have relatives up in rural Montana and I specifically remember seeing random barns and shacks out in the middle of no where (whether it's part of a farm land or someone's private land) when I go up there to visit. So it's completely plausible. And who knows? Maybe there is a house just out of view behind some trees?

And how did the walkers find them? This is a lot harder to produce plausible answers as a viewer. This is why they shouldn't have so many different directors for different episodes because some episodes leave things way too vague for the average viewer; At first I would say it was another walker group out of range that was following the group by their sweaty scent.... But it started raining, and not just raining, but pouring for quite awhile when the walkers came straight to that door, so the scent theory goes out the window. So my next conclusion was the slightly open door which was held together by a loose chain. The did cut to that door and chain a lot showing how loose it was. So I'm assuming the door and especially the loose chain in the wind and storm made just enough noise to draw the walkers in the area to that door.

Anyways, what I wanted to comment on was the barn door sequence. I as well thought the storm and wind destroyed the walker herd. Was the editing a bit too rough and violent to a sleeping Maggie? I do agree with that, but I bought it. I can go with the fact they didn't want to film walkers being blown away by the wind and the coolest part to that was the walkers approaching the door and the group all coming to hold it shut, which is what they showed.

So I didn't mind it one bit. My g/f next to me thought it was a dream, so they either wanted to make the cut extremely "violent" (as in the door is about to break then the next shot is a peaceful Maggie waking up) to make the viewer be confused and curious or they felt it necessary to skip the whole walkers getting swept away by the wind and falling trees from the storm - which is more plausible since as Michonne and Maggie walked out you clearly saw the storm and wind's work on the trees and the walkers completely mangled from it.

 

Bingo!

 

It didn't occur to me that it was a dream, just that they all worked together to keep the walkers out - and then the tornado came through and took the walkers out for them… They worked together as a family / team. Little bit bad that it wasn't explained/shown the walkers being taken off by the storm, but I guessed the effects budget couldn't cover that scene, and we were supposed to work that out.

 

There's a similar time jump in the movie Platoon. Maybe they were trying to emulate it, only without napalm.

 

The sequence did seem rather dream-like, but I never considered the possibility of it actually being a dream. That's interesting. I don't think it was, though. In the morning, for example, Maggie told Daryl it was okay for him to rest, as if he had been up keeping watch since the walkers stopped pushing on the door.

The storm was the second in a series of "miracles" that happened after Father Gabriel abandoned his faith and threw his collar into the fire. The first was the rain that fell just as they needed it to. The second, the trees that fell in the storm and trapped the walkers but missed the barn. The third, the music box that started playing when Aaron told Maggie and Sasha that he had good news.

We can look at these events as contrivances or true evidence of some sort of divine intervention, but either way the writers were taking a lot of poetic licence in this episode.