The Walking Dead 515 ‘Try’ Recap and Rating Poll
That Father Gabriel huh? Boo, hiss. What will the fallout from his confession be? How will the group deal with two deaths? Will Rick kill Pete?
Let’s find out, but remember you can check out our special episode forum here at this link.
Tonight’s episode picks up the night after last episode’s disasters, with a shot of a walker in the woods. He stomps on one of the family photos Sasha used earlier as target practice.
In the Monroe house, Deanna holds her late son Aiden’s “Run Mix” CD. The scene is lit by candles. Reg and Spencer are there as well as they sit around in silent shock.
Deanna gets up and puts the dubstep mix in a CD player. Inappropriate music, the Nine Inch Nails song “Somewhat Damaged,” bursts into the quiet room.
This music is used to cover a montage. Carol bakes a tuna casserole. Same comes to her window. Sasha is losing her mind in the sniper tower. The Walker makes its way to Alexandria’s gates.
Reg starts to cry and asks Spencer to turn off the music. There’s a knock at the door. Deanna opens it and finds Carol’s casserole, with a note that says “We’re truly sorry for your loss.” She leaves the casserole on the steps. Back inside her house she bitterly burns the note.
The walker humps the gate for a bit and then Sasha snipes it.
We cut to another scene where Daryl and Aaron are out killing walkers and recruiting. They see a light in the distance, as sign that there are people nearby.
We see that Nicholas did a video interview for Deanna right after returning from the doomed run. His version of events paints Aiden as a hero and says Glenn distracted him. Glenn, on the porch of one of the houses, is telling Rick the truth, that he tried to warn Aiden not to shoot grenades before he blowed up real good.
Nicholas tells more lies and trying to say the Glenn was trying to push his part of the revolving door open. Glenn tells the truth, that Nicholas panicked, opened the revolving door and got Noah killed.
We can see that Deanna is watching the video later. On the video she points out that Glenn brought Nicholas back and doesn’t agree, at that moment, with Nicholas when he tries to say that Rick’s group is “not like us.”
Glenn asks Rick if he should have left Nicholas to die. Rick’s opinion is that Alexandria doesn’t know what they’re doing. Glenn wants to show them, but Rick is more pessimistic. Rick says he doesn’t want to answer to Alexandria’s rules but Glenn says “We are them,” that Noah believed in the place and that they’ve got to make it work.
Carol watches Jessie’s family on their porch from afar. You can see a red balloon that Sam has tied to the porch that will come in later, possibly a reference to the 1956 French film “The Red Balloon.” Rick joins Carol and they have a conversation about Pete’s abuse and how Sam’s stories sound serious.
Carol knows that Rick has a thing for Jessie, and that he might lose her.
“If walkers hadn’t gotten Ed, I wouldn’t be standing here right now,” Carol says, reminding Rick of her own abusive husband.
“Yeah, you would,” Rick says and walks away. He cradles the secret gun Carol stole.
Pete picks this moment to come out to talk to Rick. Pete acts nice, but Rick gives him a death stare and says “Keep walking.” When Pete leaves we can see he had his hand on the trigger of the gun behind his back the whole time.
It’s 6:30 A.M. You can tell by Michonne’s clock in her room, but she doesn’t seem to have slept. She lays out her constable uniform for the day.
Rosita comes to the door and says Tara is stable after her head injury. And that Sasha spent the night in the sniper tower.
The women leave to go check it out. In the woods they’re startled by a noise. They talk about how being in the woods already feels different.
Rosita says she was screwed up because she found out Eugene lied.
“You seem screwed up because you found something,” she says.
Michonne says she feels like she was “asleep in there.” Rosita says she can’t give up trying to adapt, and the fact that she didn’t bring her sword with her is progress.
Rick visits Deanna as she’s mourning at Aiden’s grave. He tells her they have a problem with Pete and Deanna makes it clear she knows. It’s just like the situation at Grady, doctors are too valuable in the new world to not give them their way. Tara’s life, she points out, depends on Pete.
Rick suggests separating Jessie and Pete, and admits he will kill Pete if he doesn’t go along with it.
“We don’t kill people,” Deanna says. She says they exile people. Rick points out that exiled people can come back, which sure sounds like foreshadowing to me, but Deanna won’t go along with the executions.
Michonne and Rosita find some of Sasha’s expertly sniped zombies in the woods and grow more concerned she’s unhinged.
Carl is out in the woods following Enid on one of her excursion. She calls out to him and says she knows what he’s doing.
Carl tries to talk Enid into going back but she just asks “why?” He asks what she does out there but she says “Same thing as you” and sort of playfully runs off, with Carl giving chase.
The babes in the woods quickly come upon a walker. Enid’s method for dealing with it seems to be distracting it by throwing an egg timer. Which works pretty well, the walker goes to it when the timer rings.
Nicholas is cleaning blood from the back of the run van when Glenn confronts him. He tells him the four people he and Aiden abandoned to die on an earlier run and Noah are on him. He tells him “people like you are supposed to be dead,” but the walls went up in time to save him, and that he doesn’t go outside the walls any more.
Nicholas argues, but Glenn says “I know what you did.” Nicholas asks if Glenn is threatening him, but Glenn says “No, I’m saving you.”
So, our lovebirds have a seat in the woods. Enid talks about how “we’re supposed to be out here” and “running makes me feel better.” Carl talks about how he dreams about being in the forest with the walkers and she says she does, too. He asks her why she’s afraid of him and she doesn’t have an answer.
Carl admires Enid’s knife. She says it was her mom’s. He asks her what happened to her and she asks if it matters. Before he can get her to open up another walker comes by and they hide, pressed close together, in a hollow in a tree.
“It’s their world, we’re just living in it,” Enid whispers in Carl’s ear.
Their are a lot of walkers going by, enough to get together a serious conga line. Enid and Carl stare at each other face to face. Seems like a good time to go in for a kiss, but Carl chickens out.
“Cool. You’re afraid of me, too,” Enid whispers.
In the woods Nicholas digs up a cookie jar. There’s a gun inside, the one with the J written on it that Rick hid in a blender at a trash pile before entering Alexandria.
Sasha kills half a dozen or so walkers by herself with her rifle. Rosita and Michonne interrupt the slaughter.
Sasha says she’s “sick of playing defense” and apparently plans to kill every walker in the world herself. There’s a big horde coming out of the woods thanks to her stirring them up so far, so she’s off to a good start.
Sash won’t run away. She kills more than a dozen walkers and this makes Michonne flashback to when she was a feral katana-wielding samurai. She joins in shooting walkers. Sasha says she doesn’t need her help but Michonne only says, “this isn’t for you.” Rosita gets some kill in too with her knife.
The woman massacre the horde, but Sasha runs out of ammo and the last walker gets her down. Just before it kills her Michonne puts a bullet in it, which just makes Sasha angry.
“I don’t need your help,” she spits.
Without Michonne saying anything, it gets to the deeper issue of Sasha losing Bob and Tyreese and recently losing Noah, and Sasha says no one can help her.
She says she told Noah he would make it. After a long silence she walks away, and they head back. Before they leave Michonne looks down at her gun. Is the katana coming back?
Aaron and Daryl find pieces of dismembered walkers, just like the group found at Noah’s destroyed compound. Just like there, the walkers have been separated from their limbs and the torsos and heads have been taken away.
It’s a fresh kill, so they follow the trail. They find a dead nude woman tied to a tree, guts hanging out. She was put there, alive, as walker bait. She’s got a W carved in her head. She turns as the guys are investigating and Daryl stabs her in the brain.
Rick comes to visit Jessie and her stupid destroyed owl. Jessie wants to talk about how Pete has Tara on the mend. But Rick tells her he knows that Pete is hitting her and it has to stop.
Jessie tells him it will and tries to defend Pete. She says that he got help before and “things were good” and she can fix it. She tells Rick he’ll make things worse.
He says he won’t let Pete kill her. She just asks why he cares and why he’s throwing away the home he’s found. She definitely seems to realize Rick is interested her and says “I’m married.” She goes inside saying “We have to take care of ourselves.”
Rick starts to walk away. He looks around suburban, sunny Alexandria. He’s clearly upset. He sees Sam run by with the red balloon and what appear to be some of Carol’s cookies and then bolts into Jessie’s house.
“If you don’t fight, you die. And I don’t want you to die,” he says. He tells her he can keep her and her boys safe.
She asks him if he would do this for anyone. He says “no.” She agrees to let him help.
And then Pete come in the room, demanding to know what’s going on and kicking Rick out.
Jessie stands up to him and he gets angry. She tries to kick Pete out and he flies into a rage.
Pete attacks Rick and they fight. It gets pretty brutal and they end up flying through a window.
Sasha’s back in her tower. She hears the glass break from the fight and focuses in with her rifle.
Everyone in Alexandria is running to the battle. Rick and Pete are covered in blood and Rick has Pete down and is killing him. Pete briefly turns the tide, but Jessie tries to stop him and Pete knocks her away, which makes Rick angry enough to get back on top. Ironically, Carl then tries to stop Rick and is knocked away.
As Rick is killing Pete he sees Sam’s red balloon fly into the sky. Deanna runs up to stop the murder and Rick tells Pete that if he does it again he’ll kill him.
When Deanna tells Rick to stop he pulls his gun on the assembled crowd.
“Or what? You gonna kick me out?” he says.
Rick makes a speech about how Alexandria doesn’t get it, doesn’t do what needs to be done. Sasha is killing walkers at the fence while this happens. At least some of them have Ws on their heads.
Rick tells the Alexandrians that their way of doing things is done and they have to control who lives there. Deanna says that’s clear to her now.
That just makes Rick mad. He starts ranting about how if they don’t fight they die.
And then Michonne comes up behind him and knocks him the hell out. She takes the gun and gives the Alexandrians a look that could burn through steel. End of episode.