How do you follow up on one of the most violent episodes of The Walking Dead to date?  By delivering one of the most harrowing hours of the series, complete with the apparent death of a major character.  Anyone watching with the least bit of investment in Team Grimes had to feel like the floor was ripped out right under them.  It seems almost absurd to feel that measure of loss and still come away feeling like this is the strongest start to a season of The Walking Dead in ages.  

I suppose we all should have realized that something terrible was coming when Rick emphasized that some of them weren’t going to make it out of the crisis alive.  And he wasn’t even aware of the full measure of the devastation taking place around him.  It’s one thing to generally state that folks aren’t ready to survive, and quite another to resign oneself to staring at Walker Chow.  The rest of the episode was a brutal exercise in trying to keep people alive but knowing when the writing is on the wall.


So much of the power of the story is the exploration of what survival actually means, and Rick’s journey has occasionally been told instead of shown.  Not so in this episode.  While it was unlikely that they would kill off everyone, the sense of chaos and panic in the air was palpable.  These are seasoned survivors and they still wound up in dire straits.  We’ve been so conditioned to the idea that the core members of Team Grimes can survive anything that the futility of Glenn’s situation didn’t hit home until it was far too late.  

Part of the tragedy is that Rick’s philosophy was the right call.  It was trying to find a middle ground that led Glenn and Michonne into such horrifying circumstances.  Even so, I was under the impression that Nicholas, as Glenn’s personal reclamation project, would stand as an example of Glenn’s potential as a leader.  Instead, it was Glenn’s willingness to let the weak survive that literally pulled him down to his apparent doom.  I won’t be surprised if Rick uses this as an example of why his point of view is so necessary, especially in the face of such horrific odds.


And of course, it’s not over.  Rick’s own situation was horrific and who knows how much worse it’s going to have to get before the tide turns.  Rick has to survive being in the middle of the swarm first, and Daryl is going to have to come to terms with his own decisions.  The town is still exposed and the seasoned survivors are all over the map.  There are casualties left and right.  This is exactly the kind of energy that the arrival of the herd invoked in the source material, and I’m very happy to see it playing out on-screen.





One final note: while I’m going with the consensus view that Glenn was killed in this episode in terms of this review, there is some evidence to suggest that he was not the one being ripped apart.  If Nicholas fell on top of him, the zombies could have started eating Nicholas and Glenn could be ignored under all the gore.  The chances of Glenn not getting scratched or bitten might be rather small, but it would be interesting to have him live through that (especially after watching Noah get eaten not so long ago) and deal with even more up-close-and-personal trauma.