And we’re back with another episode of the Walking Dead with just four more episodes to go before the season finale! And in another lovely act of double-entendreness, the episode was named “Still”, which seems to allude to all the dead bodies laying about, the story of Daryl and Beth’s will to survive, and the moonshiner operation they raid so Beth can finally get drunk.
And of course, the episode focuses exclusively on these two, avoiding any further development where Abraham, Rosita, and Eugene’s introduction is concerned, the different group’s journey towards the mysterious “Terminus”, or their eventual reunification. Yeah, this week was all about Beth and Daryl and was basically a pacing episode.
So let’s get going and wrap this piece of enjoyable filler up so we can get back on track for next week!
Still:
The episode opens with Beth and Daryl still in the wilderness, desperately looking for food, shelter, and the other survivors. After spending the night hiding inside the trunk of a car and waiting for a horde of Walkers to move on, they set camp and enjoy a meal of firepit cooked snake. Beth then decides she needs a “real drink” and decides to head off and look for alcohol.
It’s not long before she runs into some Walkers and Daryl is forced to come retrieve her. After leading her back to the camp, she is outraged and claims that she is going off alone is she must. Daryle reluctantly accompanied her and they find their way to a country club and begin to look around. Inside, they find numerous people who committed suicide, but since came back.
While Beth looks for alcohol, Daryl busies himself collecting money, jewelry, and anything they can eat or burn. They come across several Walkers, and Beth loses the only bottle of wine she could find and her change of clothes are stained with gore. Finally, they come to the bar where the only thing left is a bottle of peach schnapps. Beth begins to cry before she can drink, and Daryl smashes the bottle.
Leading her to a cabin he sees he and Michonne found, he opens up the still and procures several bottles of moonshine. They head inside and secure the place, and Beth begins to drink. She invites Daryl to join and they begin to play “I never”, which becomes an excuse for them to open up to each other. Eventually, Daryl tires of it and begins ranting.
His outburst attracts a Walker, and he pins it to a tree with several arrows. Eventually, Beth stabs it in the head, and the two begin to argue about all they lost and how things will never be the same again. Daryle finally breaks down and admits that he blames himself for the way things ended at the prison. Beth hugs him, and the two spend the rest of the night talking.
During the night, Daryl finally tells her what he was before things turned – apparently, he and Merle were just drifters. Beth admits that she misses everyone and how she hoped her father’s remaining days would have been quiet. She also tells Daryl that she thinks he will be the last man standing, that he must put his past behind him, and suggest they burn the cabin down.
They douse the place with the remaining moonshine, and using a stack of bills Daryl took from the country club as a torch, set fire to the cabin and leave it behind. They flip the burning mess the bird, and then head off into the night when they see Walkers approaching…
Summary:
Like I said already, this was a pacing episode, which just about always translates to tangents, asides, character development and assorted filler. Nevertheless, it was enjoyable. I thought Daryl and Beth were both well portrayed, their performances believable and appropriate, and the ending was especially poignant and powerful for me.
Though I must admit, at this point in the show I am getting a bit tired of the repetitive messages – the whole “we can’t lose hope or all is lost”, or the “I don’t care anymore. Oh wait – yes I do!” stuff. It is one of the central, overriding themes of the story and it’s a good one, but it’s well established at this point. And it does kind of feel like it’s something they go back to whenever they feel the need for pacing or a bottle episode.
But aside from that, I felt they got the title of the episode wrong. Sure, Still is yet another clever double-entendre, alluding to the pain of remaining alive in the face of so much death and the moonshine-producing apparatus itself. But for me, the real essence of this episode came across in the way that everything they found to help them forget ended up being destroyed.
Think about it. Beth wants to get drunk and forget, and this brings them to the country club. There, she finds some alcohol and a nice change of clothes. But its not long before the clothes are ruined and the bottles are used for self-defense or smashed out of anger. They find the cabin and the moonshine, but then decide to destroy them because they need to blow off steam and forget all the death.
To me, a more fitting title would have been “This is why we can’t have nice things”. We can’t have nice clothes because they might get ruined. We can’t party because it will put our lives in danger. We can’t have shelter because it reminds us of our pasts. This is what it is like living in the zombie post-apocalypse people! Life is grim, unfun, and uncouth!
In any case, that’s twelve down and four to go! Hopefully, next week, we’ll see some more development on the whole “We got to get to DC” verus “We gotta find the others and/or go to this ‘Terminus’ place we keep hearing about”. Until then!
To recap a little first, I would reiterate that last season’s finale was a big letdown to me. Myself and many fans lamented the fact that after many episodes of building up to a climactic clash between Woodbury and the prison camp, the final battle was quite the fizzle. Not only were the Governor’s people routed rather easily from the prison, but the Governor himself then went batsh*t crazy, shot everybody, and then ran off into the wilderness.
The season opens with a look at a seriously changed prison, which has been augmented with new buildings in the courtyard to accommodate the new people. The new arrivals appear to have been integrated, teams comb the fence to kill Walkers, and Daryl is getting ready to make another run to town for supplies. He is joined by Glenn, Tyreese, Sasha, a young man named Zack and a former army medic named Bob.
After Bob causes some shelves to fall over and pin him down, Walkers hear them inside and begin converging on a weak spot in the roof. They then begin to fall through, and Daryl in the others are forced to fight them off while trying to free Bob from where he was pinned. Zack (Beth’s boyfriend) is bitten, but the rest manage to escape before the wreckage of the chopper falls through the roof and causes the building to collapse.
When they arrive at her camp, she tries to kill Rick but fails. He realizes her husband is now a Walker and she was simply luring him back so she could feed him something living. She then begs Rick not to kill once she’s turned, and stabs herself in the stomach. She dies saying that “you can’t come back from the things you’ve done”, and Rick leaves her and her Walker husband behind.
Rick returns and talks to Hershel about the woman he encountered, and how she reminded him of how far he came to losing it as she did. Hershel assures him that “you do get to come back”, and reminds him of how and Carl have. In the prison showers, one of the new arrivals – a boy named Patrick – succumbs to an illness that’s been effecting the livestock and comes back as a Walker.
The episode opens with Karen (a new arrival) and Tyreese having a romantic evening, before she decides to head back to her room. Patrick, now a Walker, follows her from the shower room to D block. He hears a man coughing from another cell, enters his room and kills him in his sleep. The man then turns, and begins stalking the Block with Patrick and attacking others.
Afterward, they examine Patrick’s body with the help of Dr. Subramanian and notice that he died of an illness that causes bleeding from the eyes. Having seen this before, with Walkers along the fenceline as well as pigs and birds in and around the camp, they reason that it is a flu strain that it is transmitted from swine and birds, and that it’s loose in the prison.
Meanwhile, the commotion caused by the outbreak draws more Walkers to the wall and a section begins to give. Sasha noticed that someone has been leaving bait in that section to lure the Walkers to it. The wall nearly collapses, and Rick and Daryl drive out and drop all the pigs in the field to lure the Walkers away. This gives them the time they need to reinforce the wall, and disposes of the pigs which may have brought the flu.
Rick, Daryl and Carol join Tyreese in the courtyard where he found the charred remains of Karen and David. He demands the Rick find out who did it and then let him deal with them personally, and he and Rick get into a terrible fight. Afterward, Rick is tended to by Hershel who tells him that they’ve lost 12 people from the flu, plus the two who were burned, and an outbreak may be likely.
Rick apologizes to Tyreese after the latter if finished burying Karen and David, and they agree to bury the hatchet. Tyreese once again reiterates that Rick needs to find the guilty party, and decides to look on his own since Rick appears to be dragging his heels on it. Carl joins the other kids in the sequestered area, and Glenn realizes he’s been infected too.
Rick begins investigating Karen and David’s deaths and determines they were still alive when they were burnt. Carol discovers that their water lines have become clogged and defies Rick to go out and clear them. In time, her activities draw the attention of Walkers and Rick runs out to help her. She narrowly makes it back and Rick asks her if she killed Karen and David, to which she says yes.
What’s more, there’s the issue of who they’ve chosen to kill off versus keep alive. I can understand the decision to pad the cast with extras so they can be killed off and the core characters kept alive, but that’s not even what’s happening here. At this point in the comic’s story, Andrea and Dale were still alive, but in season two and three of the show, they were both killed off.
Some things they did manage to get right about Tyreese though. The way he fought off an entire herd of Walkers using only his hammer is reminiscent of the scene from Volume Four: The Heart’s Desire where he cleared the entire prison gymnasium by himself. And the way he and Rick fought in the same episode echoes what happened later in that same volume.
But all in all, I think its pretty obvious where things are going this season. Soon enough, the entire Woodbury crew, minus a few people – like Bob, who they seem intent on developing – are going to die off, they will find a traitor in their midst (possibly the Governor himself sneaking in at night), the prison is going to start falling apart, and they are going to have to relocate.
Stories by Williams 