The Walking Dead ‘Them’ Recap and Rating Poll
Our The Walking Dead cast has dealt with so much tragedy lately it seems like more than anyone could stand. Will some break under the pressure? Read on, and discuss the episode on our special forum when we’re done.
The episode begins with Maggie in the woods, weeping. She’s so sad she ignores a Walker that sneaks up on her. It gets stuck in some trees just a few inches from Maggie. She looks at it for a long moment, then knifes it in the brain.
She sits back down and cries again.
Daryl digs up a worm and eats it.
Sasha looks for water, but just finds a ditch full of mud and dead frogs.
The three walk back to the van and the rest of the group, dejected. It’s clear they’re all dehydrated and starved.
“How much longer we got?” Maggie asks.
Sasha says it’s 60 miles (from Washington, D.C.).
“I wasn’t talking about that,” Maggie says.
The van runs out of gas so everyone goes on foot. Walkers follow them down the road.
Rick tells Daryl they’re not at their strongest so they’ll get them when they have an advantage.
Rick gives us a little exposition, helpfully letting the audience know it’s been three weeks since they left Atlanta. He tries to comfort Daryl about Beth, but Daryl changes the subject to the fact that Judith seems to be hungry and dehydrated. Rick optimistically says she’ll be fine. Due to some really good baby acting, she looks half dead.
Daryl splits off from the group to go look for water. Carol goes along. Daryl tries to object but she says “You going to stop me?”
Carl gives Maggie a music box he found while looking for water. It’s the kind with a little plastic ballerina inside that spins as the music plays, but it’s broken.
Father Gabriel tries to joke with and comfort Maggie. He makes a joke about how his priest’s shirt is at least not as bad as a hairshirt, then starts to explain what that is. Maggie cuts him off, says she knows what it is because her dad was religious. And she used to be, lots of emphasis on the used to part.
He says she can talk to him about Beth. She just reacts with anger, rubbing the fact that Gabriel locked his flock out of his church and let them be eaten by walkers in his face.
“Don’t act like that didn’t happen,” she says.
Sasha wants to go kill the walkers. Michonne understands that it’s her anger about the death of Tyreese that makes her suicidal. She says Tyreese’s anger made him stupid.
Sasha protests that they were not the same, but Michonne just says the situation is “still the same” and Sasha gives up on the kamikaze mission.
Daryl and Carol don’t find water. But they do have a heart to heart about Beth. Carol says Beth saved her life, and Daryl’s too.
Carol gives Daryl Beth’s knife as a gift.
“We’re not dead. That’s what you said. You’re not dead,” she says.
She tells him he has to let himself feel it, strokes his hair and kisses his forehead, and then walks off and leaves him to himself.
The survivors set an ambush for the walker horde near a bridge. The get on both sides of the road and as the walkers go by just push them into the river. It works great, until Sasha takes a dumb chance and starts stabbing walkers so the others have to fight.
“Plan just got dicked,” Abraham says.
Michonne tells Sasha to stop, but Sasha keeps fighting and nearly passes out. Michonne saves her, but calls her on the carpet at the end.
“I told you. To stop,” Michonne says.
The group finds some cars in the road. Daryl goes around in the woods in case it’s a trap.
Maggie looks in one of the cars, doesn’t find anything good. But she takes the keys and checks the trunk, where she finds a female walker. Its mouth and hands are tied. It was clearly a kidnap victim that died in the trunk. Maggie just closes it and walks away for a moment. She goes back to give it mercy but the key won’t work in the trunk so she gets agitated and prepares to fire into the trunk with her revolver. Glenn put a hand on her shoulder and stops her.
Glenn easily gets the trunk open and kills the walker.
He puts his hand on Maggie’s shoulder and says “let’s go.”
Daryl is creeping and sneaking through the woods. He find a dried out deer carcass, the body of a man who shot himself while sitting against a tree nearby.
The group is waiting for Daryl as he comes out of the woods. All they found in the cars was alcohol. Abraham is drinking it even though it will dehydrate him. Rosita says he knows it will make it worse.
“He’s a grown man. And I truly do not know if things can get worse,” Eugene says.
“They can,” Rosita says quietly.
As if on cue some mangy dogs come out of the woods and start barking at our guys. They’re freaked out, but Sasha takes her gun and kills them all.
Rick calmly gets up and starts breaking sticks. The next thing we see is our guys roasting dog on the sticks around a fire. Hey, food’s food. The scene is similar to the cannibal scene where the Hunters eat Bob’s leg around the fire, although this is in daylight.
Noah is staring at one of the domestic dog’s bloody collars on the ground when Sasha walks by him with firewood. He says Tyreese tried to help him, but he doesn’t know if he’s going to make it.
“Then you won’t. Don’t think. Just eat,” Sasha says.
As Maggie watches, Father Gabriel takes his priest’s collar and, without saying anything, tosses it in the fire. She doesn’t comment.
Later they are back to walking, and Maggie is refusing water from Glenn. Hey Maggie haters, here’s Maggie’s explanation of why she didn’t look for Beth. I’ll leave it in her words.
“I never thought she was alive. I just didn’t. After Daddy I don’t know, if I couldn’t. And after what Dary said I hoped she was out ther alive. And then finding out she was, and then she wasn’t in the same day and … Seeing her like that made it feel like none of it was ever really there. Before this was just the dark part and … I don’t know if I want to fight any more,” Maggie says. She looks completely and utterly drained.
Glenn encourages her to keep going, to “keep fighting,” he makes her drink some of their remaining water.
Sasha tells Abraham the booze will just make things worse. He tells her the way she’s going she’ll make things worse and she’s with friends.
“We’re not friends,” she says.
Abraham takes another drink.
Glenn tries to give Daryl water but he won’t take it.
Glenn, hurt, says they can all make it together. Daryl goes off to look for water again.
In the woods Daryl finds a barn, but doesn’t check it out. Instead he sits by a tree and lights a Morley. He burns himself with the cigarette for a long time, passively watching it sear his flesh, then drops it. Then he finally lets himself cry.
Now things get weird. As Daryl catches back up the group has found a bunch of bottles of water in the road. There’s a note that says it’s “From a friend.”
Rick says they shouldn’t drink it.
“If that’s a trap, we already happen to be in it. I for one would like to think it is indeed from a friend,” Eugene says.
Eugene tries to drink one of the bottles and Abraham violently slaps it out of his hand.
Just then it starts to rain, bringing relief that’s less likely to be poisoned. Some of the group laughs and sits in the rain, some just look depressed.
Father Gabriel sees a sign from the heavens. He cries and apologizes to God for his crisis of faith.
“I’m sorry, my Lord,” he says.
They fill their bottles but realize the storm is really bad. Daryl leads them to the barn. As every fan knows, barns are really, really bad news so they go in cautiously.
Maggie finds a stack of Bibles. Then she find an old lady in walker in a filthy nest in a room in the barn. She’s emaciated even for a walker and obviously starved to death in there. Maggie stabs it.
Carol walks up behind Maggie to see what happened.
“She had a gun. She could have shot herself,” Maggie says.
“Some people can’t give up. Like us,” Carol replies.
So they bed down in the barn. Abraham keeps getting drunk. Rick and some of the others gather around a fire.
Carl is sleeping with Judith in his arms. Carol says he’ll bounce back.
Rick says he used to feel sorry for kids who have to group “in this” but he thinks he was wrong. It’s easier for them because growing up is getting used to the world.
That just annoys Michonne, who says “this isn’t the world.”
Glenn chips in with “it might be” but Michonne gets mad and says “that’s giving up.” Michonne the optimist, ladies and gentleman.
Rick settles the argument by saying, for now, this is what they have to live with.
He tells a story about his grandfather, who didn’t want to talk about the Germans in World War II.
He said his grandfather said he was dead the minute he stepped into enemy territory, he’d get up every morning and tell himself “rest in peace.” But after a few years of pretending he was dead, he made it out alive. Rick says he thinks that’s the trick of it.
“We do what we we need to do and then we get to live,” Rick says, and no matter what they find in D.C. they’ll be okay.
“Because this is how we survive. We tell ourselves that we are the walking dead,” Rick says.
Daryl, apparently thinking of walkers, disagrees.
“We ain’t them,” he says.
Rick agrees, says they aren’t them. Daryl is still upset and walks away with another “We ain’t them.”
Later, Daryl goes to the door of the barn, where the wind is trying to blow the chained doors open. He looks outside and sees a mega-horde of walkers is attacking. He tries to brace the door. Maggie and Sasha hear first and help. Then everyone runs to hold it.
They all pull together and push against the horde and the howling winds outside. Carl even leaves Judith in the dirt and runs to help. There are lots of gritted teeth and strained muscles.
In the morning Maggie wakes up, not dead. Judith, in a sleeping Rick’s arms, is looking right at her. Everyone else is sleeping on the floor of the barn.
Maggie notices that Daryl is still up. He’s kept watch all night. She sits beside him and says he should get some sleep.
“It’s okay to rest now,” she says.
They see a sleeping Sasha. Daryl says Tyreese was tough and Maggie agrees.
“So was she,” Daryl says, referring to Beth. “She didn’t know it. But she was.”
This makes Maggie smile a bit. Daryl hands her the music box, which he has cleaned and fixed. She thanks him and them goes to wake Sasha.
The pair go outside. The walkers they had held off have been miraculously killed by the storm, mostly by falling trees.
“Should have torn us apart,” Sasha says.
“It didn’t,” Maggie replies.
They find a nice place to watch the sunrise. Sasha asks why they are here and Maggie says “for this.”
Sasha says Noah told her he didn’t know if he’d make it, but “that’s how I feel.”
“You’re gonna make it,” Maggie says. “Both of us. We will. That’s the hard part.”
Both women cry.
Maggie opens the music box and winds it. It doesn’t work and they laugh.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Maggie says.
A clean, well-dressed man walks up behind Maggie and Sasha. They draw their guns on him. He apologizes for interrupting.
“My name is Aaron. I know it’s, stranger danger. But I’m a friend,” he says. He wants to talk to Rick.
The women ask him why.
“I have good news,” Aaron says.
All of a sudden, the music box springs to life and the plastic ballerina dances to the pretty tune. End of episode.