TV Recap: The Walking Dead 207, "Pretty Much Dead Already"

The conflict of The Walking Dead's midseason finale "Pretty Much Dead Already" comes from each leader -- or wannabe leader -- feeling the standstill of their situation come to a boiling point. Hershel's secret is out, putting pressure on Rick to challenge their host's belief structure, while Rick is continuously undermined by Shane's impatience towards their sitting still. It's probably the only thing that Shane shares with the viewing audience. Even Glenn's feeling the strain of his former complacency, and the scene opens on his inability to not act.

Camp's quiet, in the aftermath of secrets spilled, and everyone sits in contemplative quiet with the slow-burn of anxiety and Andrea's persistent whet stone. Til Glenn drops the bomb, partly, it seems, by Dale's influence. A quick hop-skip over to the barn ensues, where Shane decides to stick his face right up to it. Shane proposes leaving -- he's sick of looking for a girl who's got no chance -- which gets even Darryl to call him out being an asshole. Ah, the familiar sound of internal squabbles and punches being thrown. "I was going to tell you this morning, but Glenn wanted to be the one" explains Dale over why he knew already. Good thing nobody asked how long Glenn's known. Their yelling clearly upsets the zombies, who don't like to hear mommy and daddy fighting.

But as the action returns-- there is no action. Just Shane getting some scouting out around the barn, deciding that sticking his face into it once wasn't enough. He's pretty keen on opening it up. Glenn goes to talk to Maggie, but sort of gives himself a bad start by already starting out on the other side of a literal fence. He wants to talk; she breaks an egg over his head. It's going well.

In the other neck of the woods, Carl continues to ask the difficult questions. Which is probably more entertaining than the homework he's doing. Even the apocalypse can't stop math. But while he's disillusioned towards Shane, he's not lost hope in Sophia.

Sophia's mother catches Darryl heading out on another probably stolen horse while still injured. She expresses doubt for the first time, confessing that she's come to care for Darryl, and losing him while Sophia's already gone would wreck her. But emotion makes Darryl cranky, so he calls her a bitch and retreats to where he can pretend he has no heart.

In the RV, Dale expresses his doubts towards Shane to Andrea. She's caught in the allure of Shane's ability to turn off his emotions-- her own twisted and burdensome to her. "He's not a victim," she tells Dale, who remains unconvinced. For as much as she says she doesn't like his concern, when Dale says he's calling it quits, Andrea can't quite let it go. But she leaves anyway, to hang out with her bald hunnybunny. Dale hovers rather suspiciously over his bag o'guns as he tells Glenn to give him a moment.

Hershel's enjoying a lunch and light read when Rick arrives. Hershel tells him to leave, and Rick tries to reason with him, telling him that there's only two kinds of people out there in the world. You either get dead, or become "something a lot less than the person you once were." He gives Hershel a state of the world address, trying to convince the stubborn patriarch that the physical cocoon he's embalmed his family in here has blinded him to how harsh conditions truly are. When Hershel seems unwavering, Rick lays the last card on the table: by the way, my wife's pregnant, you insensitive bastard. Not in so many words. Hershel sends him out, but the damage is done on the nerve of eavesdropper Maggie. Storming outside, Rick manages not to get into it with Shane about sleeping with his wife, just everything else.

Maggie pleads the case with Hershel, but they're interrupted by "it". What is it? Hershel comes upon Rick planning a new course of action over Sophia, and asks for Rick's help with "it", denying Andrea's assistance. With the husband away, Shane confronts Lori, calling Rick out: "He ain't built for this world" and claiming that he's saved Lori's life more than Rick ever has. Which... is a weird grading system. Even though the world's gone to shit, Lori wants more than a bulldog; she wants a husband. Shane wants the baby to be his. Shane gets no leniency anywhere; Carl even tells him what's what, and that his attitude is full of crap. That's about as much as Shane wants to put up with, but when he storms into the RV, he discovers the guns are missing. So's Dale. Convenient.

Hershel brings Rick to a swamp where walkers often get stuck, testing him by asking him to help rescue the walkers out who are trapped there. The swamp is apparently a dangerous place. It's also the chosen hiding place of Dale -- except that Shane's already found him. Dale levels a gun on Shane but is unable to pull the trigger. When Shane takes the weapons, Dale defends his actions. "When the world goes to shit, I didn't let it take me down with it." Dale's moral stability continues to make him a candidate for early death.

Darryl and Sophia's Mum have a heart to heart where Darryl proves less allergic to his own one. "What else I got to do," is how he puts it. Rick struggles with steering a walker out of the swamp. Glenn tries to talk to Maggie, finally defending his own action "I'm sick of secrets; secrets get you killed." He has it out, finally realizing that he's been treating the apocalypse like a video-game but that doesn't mean his view is less valid than Maggie's. Walkers are dangerous. But they also get you some action, apparently, since his newfound balls have Maggie forgiving him pretty quick. Only Glenn is getting any.

Oh yeah, there's a black guy in this. He walks up just in time for Shane to give a call to arms -- and some arms. He even tries to give Carl a gun, before everybody spots Rick herding the new walkers in with Hershel. This pretty much is about all Shane can take. So he flips his lid and shoots the walker Hershel's been herding. Then he decides all the walkers in the barn should join the party. As he breaks the locks and walkers begin to wander out, the rest of Rick's camp step up to the shooting gallery, each taking their stance of survival -- Glenn shooting a look to Maggie for permission to put a lead one in the face of her loved ones. Opening fire, they determinedly gun down every single one of them until there's only a pile of corpses as Hershel and his family stare on in mute shock, their precious world stability crumbled like so many downed walkers.

There's just one more moan to attend to. The tiny shuffling feet belong to none other than Sophia, who emerges from the barn with white hungry eyes to the horror of everyone looking on. And looking on is all they do. Previously trigger happy, the band stand there like hypocrites when it comes to as efficiently taking out one of their home. Sophia is left to hobble over the bodies of the others until Rick's face hardens. He purposefully moves past each other person to confront Sophia -- confront the task -- straight-on with a practical but empathetic stare. He shoots. Sophia falls. No one else would.

This is why Rick's the leader.

TV Recap: The Walking Dead S206, "Secrets"

"Everything's food for something else." From the mouths of babes. It's Carl's flippant air of survivalist nature that runs as catalyst for Lori's inevitable decision in The Walking Dead's episode 6, "Secrets". There has never been a more appropriate episode title. But, as we found out, Walking Dead writers aren't interested in stringing us painfully along with secrets that shamble on like the walkers that are so prevalently missing from the show -- they're interested in exploring what effect these secrets have on the people who must work with them. We're shown a bevy of secret-keepers, and how they deal with their pesky issues.

First up is Glenn, who couldn't lie to save his life, but at least he's honest about it -- although, really, at that point, what choice does he have. The problem with Glenn's inability to lie is that he also has an ability to look like he isn't covering something up. He's easy prey for Dale's cool intuitiveness, which we'll explore in more depth later. Glenn's progression is an interesting one, as he offers a hand to Lori, acting in both the interest of the child and of his perceived friendship with the woman. Nevermind that she asked him to go pick up some birth control pills.

Taking Maggie along on the venture with him proves troublesome when she's angry at him, then disagreeing with him, then bitching about his friends, then almost killed. But at least after she's done chucking things at Lori, she admits she has feelings for him. The most notable point comes from this last confrontation, where Maggie gives Glenn's passive character the kick in the ass he's been needing: "You're walker bait," she says, after telling him he's a better leader than he lets the team give him credit for. She also uses the term "walker", which she had, minutes ago, denounced him for saying.

Glenn's dangerously fraught journey into the town with Maggie didn't just allow her to express her feelings, but demonstrated the continued tension of one lifestyle versus the other. Directly after Maggie described the walkers as "people", she was attacked by one. In saving her, Glenn also seemed to be pointing out the flaws in her point-of-view; though he has been seen as the "weakest" member of his own group, to those with Hershel's blinders on, he is still a brutal killer, who is able to do what it takes to survive. (Although, can we take a second to wonder, again, why the shelves are so low in the pharmacy? Some things are understandable, but how many other women seriously needed to raid the pregnancy test collection before Lori.)

Off elsewhere, Rick and the menfolk are making plans. They huddle over a map, still absorbed in the task of determining where a frightened Sophia might be hiding. Based on Darryl's discovery last episode, they have a point to work from. But don't expect to hear much from Darryl on that; after a tiny apology from Andrea, he won't be showing up again.

We should be honestly surprised any of them allowed guns after what happened before, but okay. They've promised to behave so clearly things'll be different, right? Sure. At least Rick demonstrates that he's the only television character who learns from the previous episode by requiring all supposedly Hershel-approved endeavors to be run by Hershel. Revolutionary.

This leads us to Lori's protest that Carl be allowed to learn how to fire. At this point, the kid's already been shot -- as she herself says -- he might as well know how to fire. The odds are fairly high that the need will come up eventually, and a kid who's trained is better than a kid flopping around traumatized by the thought of a weapon. Learning to use one doesn't mean he has to walk around with one in his pants (sorry, Carl). We are, however, left wondering how actually comforting it is to hear that Shane used to teach younger kids how to fire. The argument makes Lori have to be the 'bad guy' again, but she folds, insisting that Carl treat this as serious as it is.

Once they get firing, Andrea proves herself to be a rather keen natural marksman, which presses all of Shane's manly buttons. Their courtship continues in the vein of Andrea seeking a bit of that danger and swagger that Shane projects, while Shane probes Andrea (not literally; yet) for a like-mind. When he gets her out alone and tests those boundaries by riling her up when she can't hit a moving target, Andrea balks. She's unable to surpass her sentimental psyche that says bringing up Amy is too sensitive in order to break into the survivalist, brutally uncaring world that Shane wants her to join him in. Also, at this point, I have to ask: at what point are they learning, and at what point are they just wasting bullets?

The courtship ritual moved on to Shane chasing Andrea down in his car -- this very familiar sight from more romantic venues was a surprising vision of the world they left behind. A man and a woman having an argument. It was as simple as that. Oh, until they journeyed into the walker-infested suburbia (social commentary?) and Andrea had to prove herself under fire. Or, that she could fire. Under fire. She proved it; and it's pretty obvious that she liked it. She even decided to show Shane just how much she liked it on the ride back. Regretfully, for some of us, that meant with sex, and not a bullet to the head.

Dale's the unexpected hero of this episode, emerging while everyone else is away having their own personal dramas or firing their guns off. Gleaning information from Glenn was perhaps not too difficult, but the cool, non-confrontational approach he takes when talking to Hershel about the walkers in the barn shows a sophistication the rest of the group sorely lacks. He even offers to contribute by making sure the area is secure, rather than jumping down Hershel's throat that they all be shot.

While everyone else blusters around, Dale is able to come at Hershel without that build-up of butting heads. Though Rick is docile and generally puppy-doggish, he's also a younger man, in his prime, and a leader who works towards the desires and benefits of his own group. This is a challenging picture to an older gentleman who just wants his own family and to do things his own way. However, no matter how calmly Dale presents his case, Hershel poses a question for both him and viewer: "Rick's a man of conscience; but are you so sure about everyone in your group?"

The magical power of Dale's intuition didn't stop there. He also smoothly approached the topic of Lori's pregnancy, expressing little actual surprise over her revelation that she'd been with Shane. Once again, he handled the passing of secrets with composure and sensitivity. He just wasn't able to reassure her that this was the best place to pop out a baby. Don't sweat that one, Dale. Instead, he moved onto the next person in need of a little intuitive wake-up call: Shane. Unfortunately, a romp in the front seat wasn't enough to mellow the cap-wearing cop once Dale approached in father-mode. Dale confronted Shane over the possibility that Otis hadn't 'died in the way Shane suggested. "I know what kind of man you are" he levels. Shane's own "a little boy lived because of what went down that night" condemned him as well as anything else -- his non-specificity pointing a giant glaring headlight at his lie of omission. And, yes: we think you're the kind of guy who threatens other guys while trying to sound insulted that it's suggested you're that kind of guy.

Last on the stop of the secret train was Lori's conflict with telling Rick that she was pregnant, and if she wanted to have the baby. Flying by the highly controversial abortion attempt, more of note was her confrontation with her husband earlier: "Were you gonna tell me?" accuses Lori, when Rick is revealed to have concealed the information that Hershel wants them gone. That one'll come back to bite her later. Testing the waters of trust isn't exactly wise when you're holding onto a big one, yourself. In fact, she had the balls to ask "Does it matter?" when Rick asked her how long she'd been keeping the secret of her pregnancy from him. Really, she of all people should have known that was an extremely stupid question.

Perhaps the single most amazing thing about "Secrets", however, (besides Dale and his magic) was that things got said. Not a lot else happened, as is theme with this current season -- but secrets were outed, and people acted responsibly about them. Rick tried to reason out why his wife slept with another man. Possibly because he is made out of empathy and eats understanding for breakfast. There is likely to be fall-out from this in the next episode, but that's what makes The Walking Dead's explorations continue to be quality writing: people learn, people evolve (except you, Shane), secrets get to be said, and then we know that we'll get to watch how that affects everyone.

Till next time: exactly how much did Glenn's vaguely foreshadowing-sounding "I always do [come back]" alarm you?