Original Airdate: February 8, 2015
Welcome back, Walkers! It’s time to get this season started again!
We begin as a shovel sifts through the earth. A picture is on a desk. Maggie and Noah sob. Father Gabriel offers a blessing as we have flashbacks of the prison, and where everyone has been. Noah tells Rick that Beth was going to Virginia with him. Rick tells the rest of the group that Noah says there was a safe space there. If it doesn’t work out, then they keep going. (Oh, and it looks like Eugene is alive) The flashbacks keep coming, including seeing Mica and Lizzie. Lizzie even has a hole in her head. They look at the picture in the frame; it’s a house. “It’s better now,” Mica says, smiling. Blood pools on the picture.
Ok, so we’re off to a creepy start….
The car speeds down the road. Noah is guiding Tyreese, Glenn, Michonne and Rick toward this sanctuary. Rick checks in via radio with Carol to make sure the radios still work. Noah tells them that the trade was the right move. It just went wrong. Tyreese recalls his father telling him that he needed to pay attention to what was going on around them when he was little. “Paying a high cost of living,” his father called it. (Tyreese should be watching the road more carefully, by the way) Noah thinks his mother and twin brothers are still alive. Rick wants to leave the road and walk the last mile or so, just in case.
They leave the car with some abandoned ones, and Noah leads the way. There’s a fence up, and Noah tells Michonne that his people wanted to do it, so they must have gotten around to it at last. Noah nicks his forehead crawling under the fence. Glenn pokes his head out and sees a gate. There aren’t any spotters out today, which seems strange, really. There is a grandfather clock on the road leading to the gates. The gates are locked so Glenn climbs over to see what’s going on. He gives a little shake of his head. Noah climbs over, followed by the rest of the group. Everything has been burned to the ground. Bodies are strewn everywhere. Noah grabs his head and collapses, sobbing. Graffiti lines the walls and the neighborhood is like a ghost town. Tyreese tells Noah that he’s part of their group now. As Michonne goes to clear out a Walker, Rick gets on his knees and tells Noah he’s sorry. He suggests that they make a sweep to find supplies. Rick radios in to Carol and reports that the town is gone.
As they sweep the town, Rick tells Glenn that Dawn didn’t mean to kill Beth. He wanted to kill her, but he didn’t. He tells Glenn that Beth wanted to get Noah back home, so this trip was for him. It could have been for them, too, but clearly it isn’t.
Noah sits and weeps in the street. Tyreese watches over him and tells Noah that he wanted to die, but then he had to keep going for Judith. She was his mission. If he’d given up, that never would have happened. He chose to live. “This isn’t the end,” he tells Noah. Noah gets up from the ground as Tyreese cheers him on. He limps away toward an abandoned house.
Glenn tells Rick he was thinking about the guy in the storage container at Terminus and how he stopped before he died. He got Maggie back. Losing the hope in going to Washington, and losing Beth after finding out she was alive, that was hard. He would have shot Dawn dead. Michonne tells them to stop. They could be out there too long. Noah rushes down to his house and demands to go inside. Tyreese wants to go in first. The door’s open and there’s blood on the walls. Noah follows closely. Inside there is a woman on the ground with her head bashed in. Noah covers her up. He tells her that he tried to get back sooner. Tyreese continues into the hallway and comes upon a door that is closed. The sound of Walkers is behind it. A dead boy is in the bedroom. Tyreese pauses and sees pictures of the twins on the wall. As he looks, the Walker twin sneaks up and bites him on the arm. Noah rushes in and stabs his brother in the eye with a model plane. Noah tells Tyreese to wait while he gets help. Oh no, not Tyreese!
The picture is on the ground. The radio in the boys’ room drones on with a report about attacks and military forces. We see the prison tower. Tyreese gets a visit from the man he didn’t kill back in the cabin. The ghost ponders what would have happened if he hadn’t been allowed to live. Bob shows up and says the ghost is full of bull shit, given that he’d been bitten at the food shed. The Governor appears and says that Tyreese had promised to do what it took to earn his keep. Mica and Lizzie say it’s better now. It isn’t better now, the Governor growls. He’s replaced by a Walker who charges at Tyreese in a rage. Tyreese uses a geode to smash his brain in. His arm is gushing blood. The Walker leaks blood down onto the picture.
Michonne gathers supplies and tells Rick that they could reinforce it again. He doesn’t like that it’s in a forest without sight lines. Michonne says they could cut the trees to build walls. She goes through the hole to make a point, but then she sees that the bodies have been mangled. There’s something horribly wrong with the way things went down in this little town. Glenn says that it didn’t matter who killed Dawn. “Washington,” Michonne says. She thinks Eugene knew there would be a chance in Washington. There might be people there, and now that they’re less than a hundred miles away and right now they’re just “making it.” It would be a better chance than anything. “We should go to Washington,” Rick agrees.
They hear Noah screaming and find him under attack from a group of Walkers. They clear them away and Noah tells them that Tyreese has been bitten. The group runs off to help.
Beth is there, playing her guitar. Mica and Lizzie tell Tyreese that things are better. The Governor tells Tyreese that he didn’t adapt or change even though he tried to tell Tyreese that he needed to change. Bob agrees that this is all there is. Tyreese tells the Governor that he is dead and that he forgave Carol because it isn’t over yet. He never turned away, he kept listening to the news and he kept going so he could do what he could do to help. Nobody has to die today, he says. The Governor shoves him against the wall and says that he has to pay the bill. The girls grab his hand and hold it as Tyreese fades away.
Back in reality, it’s Rick who is holding his hand, holding it tight so that Michonne can hack it off. With one swipe, the arm is gone. But is it too late?
We see Rick and company carrying Tyreese out, and now we see the dreamy sequence from the beginning of the episode once again. This is what Tyreese is seeing. Noah tries to keep Tyreese safe while the rest of the group takes out the Walkers who have gathered around the fence. We get a nice slow-motion sequence showing Walkers being killed. As they run out, the voices keep talking to him, telling him that it’s going the way it was supposed to. Beth sings to him as the girls smile at him. “I’m a struggling man and I’ve gotta move on,” she sings.
They get to the car and Rick tells Carol that they need to cauterize the wound, and that Sasha and Carl don’t need to see what happened. The tires are stuck in mud and Rick hits the car in front of him. The trunk is full of Walker heads.
Tyreese hears the radio reports of what was happening in the camps after the start of the virus. He sees Noah, but then the vision shifts and Beth is driving. She’s alive and happy. The girls are beside him, smiling. Bob looks back from the front seat. The truck stops and the group takes Tyreese’s body out.
Now we see the dirt again, and the shovel. Father Gabriel speaks. Sasha scoops dirt onto a grave. We hadn’t seen Beth’s burial. It was Tyreese’s funeral.
Rick digs quickly. We see a cross with Tyreese’s hat on it.
RIP, Tyreese.
(Ok, so there isn’t much to add to this fantastic episode… Tyreese will be sorely missed. But wasn’t it great to see Beth, Bob, the Governor, and the Girls?)
See you next week!
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