The road to Washington is paved with dusty trails and little else. Our tried and true group is obviously desperate by now for food and water. It’s been weeks since they were in Atlanta. Maggie’s lips are discolored, Daryl digs for worms, and Sasha stumbles across a frog graveyard. They’ve only got 60 more miles until their last car runs out of fumes. It’s hot out there, though, and there’s nothing-no abandoned cars, no cabins in the wood. But they keep pressing on. Everyone lost someone in Atlanta. Gabriel tries to get it out of Maggie, but she snaps back at him. Michonne tries to tell Sasha to not act stupid because that’s basically what happened with Tyreese. Rick needs reminding that baby Judith is probably hungry by now. Carl gifts Maggie with a broken jewelry box and she immediately lights back up. Basically, everyone’s really, really delirious and hell bent on not doing stupid things for at least 24 hours.
They have to confront that pack of stalking walkers that’s been trailing them for the past few miles. At this point in their dehydrated states, they’re walking, rather-staggering along just as slowly as the walkers are. In the standoff, Sasha gets too carried away and Michonne reminds her to keep her cool. She doesn’t listen and ends up slicing Abraham’s arm. Nice one, Sasha. Now, we’ve seen Sasha become unglued before and we know she trusts absolutely no one now that her inner circle is gone. She’ll put up her tough exterior for a few more minutes before it comes crumbling down. Up the road, the whole group spots a pack of abandoned cars-finally! Their faces say it all. This is like finding an oasis in the desert out here. Maggie tries one car, but it’s empty-well, except for that walker tied up in the trunk. Wait, what? Tied up? Meanwhile, Daryl decides to walk off into the woods because Daryl walking off and brooding in the woods is what he does best. Carol invites herself along. She hands him Beth’s knife and tells him he has to feel it, he has to grieve.
Glenn comes over to aid Maggie and check for himself. They find the rest of the group, but it isn’t clear if they bother to mention the trunk. Daryl is still in the woods-he sees a skinned animal and a walker that’s been taken down by a human. He knows someone’s been here, but the question is: Are they still in the area? When he finds the rest of the group, the feeling remains the same-hopelessness. Eugene starts to say that things couldn’t get much worse, but that’s just when a pack of rabid dogs emerge from the woods, chains around their necks. Rick starts for his knife first, as everyone else slowly inches off their seat on the ground. But suddenly, Sasha’s gun kills them in a matter of seconds. And now, dinner is served.
Tara looks less than thrilled to be eating dog meat. Gone are the days of pulled pork tacos on Tuesdays with her girls. Now she’s eating dog on the side of the highway. Eugene chomps away-be still my achy, breaky heart. Maggie eats the barbequed meat like it’s jerky. And Gabriel removes his priest collar and sets it in the fire. Maggie’s eyes dart up. She’s obviously surprised to see his spirit in such distress. Even when Gabriel has acted like a coward, he’s maintained his priesthood and his faith. But now his face says something else: His faith is slipping hard. But isn’t everyone slipping hard now? Abraham is hitting the bottle-he offers some to Sasha who tells him that’ll only make things worse. Of course she’s right, but that’s like the pot calling the kettle black. Abraham tells her she’s going to make things worse for herself, she’s among friends-and she’s basically like, “Listen you tipsy ginger, you’re not my friend.”
Daryl takes a walk up a path where he spots some kind of structure. He takes a seat and pulls out a wad of bent cigarettes and lights one. After he takes a few puffs, he puts the cig out on his hand. The man doesn’t even wince, because Daryl’s tough as nails, right? Yeah. Sure. A few seconds pass and the sun shows itself from behind trees and the clouds and Daryl begins to sob. This Deep Daryl Sob deserves a moment of silence, as always.
Back at the group, morale is lower than a botched game of Oregon Trail. Maggie won’t even talk anymore. Glenn tries getting through to her-telling her she’s stronger than this. But that light in Maggie’s eyes is completely gone. She talks about finding out Beth was alive and dead in the same day. She’s not sure she sees a point in going on anymore. That’s when the group stumbles onto a cluster of full water bottles. Eugene reaches down eagerly, like a kid at the Willy Wonka factory who can’t help himself. The bottle is knocked out of his hand and covers his mullet with water. Apparently, some kind of “friend” has left these behind, but what type of friendly gesture is this? Certainly, the group can’t rely on blind faith at a time like this. Suddenly, the sky opens up and lets out the biggest rain fall. The scowls turn to smiles, but the question hangs in the air as the dirt washes off their skin. Who left these behind?
Tara and Rosita get down on the ground and open up their mouths like kids in the snow. But there are those few who don’t see this as the blessing Gabriel believes it is. Sasha remains stoic, Maggie is lifeless, and Daryl keeps to himself (post-cry). As Baby Judith begins to cry and the sky rolls in tons of thunder, Daryl says he found a barn and they make a run for it. The barn is lucky shot. There’s only one walker left inside, an old woman covered in lace and dust. Maggie kills her and shows Carol the woman’s rifle. “She could’ve killed herself,” she points out. “Some people just can’t,” Carol says, offering that their group is a good example of that. But as Maggie lay on the ground faced away from the group with the same expressionless look on her face, a dark feeling begins to set in.
Around a fire in the middle of this barn, as their clothes dry and their faces look unbelievably less dirty from that much-deserved downpour, Rick begins to tell a story. He’s talking first about kids these days, and how he originally felt like they would have it the hardest-living in this kind of world. Michonne says, “This isn’t the world.” But Glenn, looking back at Maggie, decides maybe it is. So, what if it is the world? Rick says that no matter what they find in D.C., he knows they’ll be OK. “This is reality until we see otherwise,” he says. He knows that kids these days have it easier, because growing up means you embrace how the world works. When Rick was a kid and he asked his grandpa if he killed any Germans in the war, he was told “that’s grownup stuff.” His grandpa got quiet, Rick remembers. “He said he was dead the minute he stepped into enemy territory.” He rested in peace, and then he got up and went to war. And then he says it all. “We do what we need to do, and then we get to live. This is how we survive. We tell ourselves that we are the walking dead.”
But Daryl has something to add. “We ain’t them.” Rick grabs his arm and assures him that they’re not. But I get it. They’re at war, not just with the walkers but also within their minds. This is life, but it doesn’t feel much like living. I love how they place Carol next to Michonne in this scene. They are two of the strongest people in the pack. That’s the trick though-like Rick says, to get up and do it anyway, until the scene changes, until the reality changes into something else-to stick with it until that opportunity opens up, like the sky.
Speaking of, there’s a tornado brewing now, and walkers want in. They rush to the barn door and the entire group, one by one, comes together to block the door from busting open. They look like they’re not going to be able to hang on, but then it cuts to morning, and everyone is peacefully resting. The storm has passed, and when Maggie takes Sasha outside, they see walkers pierced by tree limbs and total destruction everywhere. They can’t believe it. This storm should’ve destroyed this rickety cabin, but it didn’t.
Maggie walks Sasha over to a clearing, and they sit down and begin to cry as the sun rises. Sasha says she sees it, but that she feels like Maggie, like she isn’t going to make it. Maggie tells her she will. Because now she knows she has to, and we begin to see her smile. Maybe it was her chat with Daryl. He lost Beth, too. Suddenly she snaps out of it, she knows Sasha has lost so much. They all have. Why feel sorry for themselves for one more second? Daryl was right. They aren’t the walking dead, they can’t be. They’re survivors. They cannot be dead; they have to fight for the people who are. Maybe it was the storm and their group effort, maybe Gabriel was wrong after all, and there’s still something out or up there looking out for them. Maybe somewhere Beth is parting the clouds and playing her guitar from the heavens and there’s a protective bubble around our beloved group. But, nothing is what it seems. We can’t assume we’ll die, and we can’t assume we’ll live. We have to accept each new reality.
This one’s a real cliffhanger. The cliffiest of hangers. A put-together man walks up and surprises our newly bonded girls sitting on the log, trying to get a busted jewelry box to play music. He says his name is Aaron. He’s dressed like he just stepped off a J.Crew catalog photo shoot. He doesn’t look like he got caught in the storm like they did. So where did he come from? Like good girls, they point their guns at him-no strangers to strangers. “Stranger danger, I get it,” he says. Charms won’t get you anywhere though, Aaron. He says he’d like to speak to their leader. He even knows it’s Rick. The girls look shocked. And then the jewelry box begins to play its music as the sun fills the sky. Who is this dude and why is he ruining their Secret Garden friendship moment? I was nearly hoping a goat with a bell and a blue ribbon would appear, but you pop up instead.
What. The. Fuck.
Any guesses? Aliens? Government cover-up? Someone associated with Terminus? Someone who knows someone down in Atlanta? At the brink of such despair, is it possible some new reality is about to completely shock our group like never before?
Tune in next week for the most anticipated episode of the season yet! And follow me on Twitter @the_hoff. Stay hydrated out there, you walking deads.
