The Walking Dead
“Always Accountable”
November 15, 2015
3 weeks and still no Glenn.
While Alexandria is busy being attacked by Wolves and Glen is busy not being eaten by dumpster zombies and Rick is busy leading half the hoard straight to Alexandria’s gates and Morgan is busy saving that one Wolf for some reason, Daryl, Sasha and Abraham are busy leading the other half of the hoard twenty miles down the road. Once they reach that twenty mile mark, their big plan is 1. speed up and 2. turn left. And it works!
Until they drive through a group of very active shooters. Shooting shooting shooting shooting shooting, and, after a crash, Daryl drives off into the woods, whereas Sasha and Abraham drive into town, hop out of their car and return fire. Shooting shooting shooting shooting shooting, and Sasha and Abraham win the big gun fight, hooray! Abraham wants to go stab some dead shooters in the face, but Sasha reminds him that there could be more gunmen, so he needs to just cool it.
They go look for Daryl, but only find his bullet casings, and Abraham suggests that he must already be on his way back to Alexandria. Sasha, however, knows that Daryl wouldn’t leave them behind, and explains that with a tracker you stay put and let them find you. To that end, she scratches “DIXON” on a door to let him know where they have holed up for safety and endless, boring nattering about who even knows what.
There’s a walker trapped in the office that Abraham is anxious to kill, but Sasha tells him that he’s being reckless. Something about control and loose ends and itchy bottoms and jumping out of planes and moving cars and how with the relative safety of Alexandria they don’t have any excuses for not being accountable for their choices? I don’t know. Frankly, the best parts of this scene are the messages scrawled on the whiteboard in the insurance office:
PROUD TO HAVE PROVIDED VALUE
I PRAY FOR THE WORLD
KEEP GOING
STAY CHEERFUL
THE BITE KILL
Apparently bites kill grammar, too.
The next morning, Abraham takes a walk and finds on a bridge a Humvee filled with cigars and some RPGs. He also discovers a walker with an RPG strapped to its back impaled and hanging off a bridge post, whom he slaps around for a while before pulling himself together, backing off and enjoying a smoke. The walker eventually falls off the post, conveniently leaving the RPG behind. And that’s how Abraham learns that he doesn’t have to kill every walker he comes across. Or something.
Abraham returns to Sasha to show her all the new toys he found thanks to “butt stink idiocy.”
Anyway, the point is, Abraham likes that Sasha calls him on his nonsense, and he’d like to get to know her better, if she knows what he means.
Sasha knows exactly what he means but instead of being like, “YOU KNOW, I JUST LOST MY BOYFRIEND LIKE A WEEK AGO, DUDE,” Sasha points out that he has “some stuff to take care of,” with a smile.
While Sasha and Abraham are conspiring to break Rosita’s heart, Daryl is off in a part of the woods that appears to have been set on fire, dealing with his wounds when he hears something behind him. He grabs his crossbow and investigates, where he finds two young women in the woods, hands over their heads, explaining that they “earned” what they took. Daryl’s all, “wuhhh?” but is then bopped in the back of the head by some dude. Ouch!
As Daryl drifts in and out of consciousness that night, he hears the trio discuss how he must be a soldier from the outpost — which I think means they think he’s one of the gunmen? — and they go through his things.
The next morning, the guy, “D” we’re calling him apparently, wakes a tied-up Daryl, and orders him to start marching. Daryl is like, “Dude, I am not the droid you’re looking for,” but D isn’t hearing it and waves a gun in Daryl’s face, urging him to shut it.
As they march along through the woods with their bags, D explains that they will trade Daryl back to the people he came from, which considering he thinks Daryl is with the guys who tried to shoot Daryl in the face is cold comfort. D tells Daryl that while he might think he has to kneel, they don’t. SO THERE. NYAH.
Walking through the burnt woods, walking through the burnt woods, walking through the burnt woods. D yammers at the women that they need to find Patty and then they can leave. D then explains to Daryl, for no particularly good reason, that they were the ones that set the forest fire, which drew walkers into it. They were doing their part: fighting the good fight, which they assumed everyone was doing. D then bemoans that they were stupid. Daryl tells D that he’s not being stupid now, and so D is like, “wait, does that mean you think I am stupid? That I should kill you? Or are you paying me a compliment? I am very confused.”
They eventually come upon a fenced-in parking lot filled with trucks and walkers, and D and the women are like, “OH NO, PATTY! SHE’S GONE!” And then the younger woman faints, giving Daryl the perfect opportunity to grab the duffel bag with his crossbow in it and run.
Once in the woods, he tries calling Sasha and Abraham on the radio, but gets nothing but static. And that’s when a mossy walker starts heading his way. Though he struggles to get the crossbow out of the duffel bag — BECAUSE A DUFFEL BAG IS NO PLACE FOR A CROSSBOW, COME ON — Daryl manages to get it out and shoot the mossy walker in the nick of time.
And that’s when he finds the insulin cooler in the bag.
So Daryl, being the good guy that he is, returns the insulin to the group, but takes D’s gun and whittling project for good measure. Which is when a truck full of guys comes barreling through the woods at them. Daryl hides, and listens as one of the guys demands that D return what he took from them: the women. “Uh, no?” says D, and then everyone just runs away.
Running through the burnt woods, running through the burnt woods, running through the burnt woods. Daryl gives D his gun back, and then lures one of the truck guys towards a hidden walker who bites Truck Guy but good on the arm. So the leader of the Truck Guys, let’s call him “Wade” chops off Truck Guy’s arm, and calls of the search for Daryl and his new friends.
As they continue to make their way through the woods, D explains that he joined Wade and the truck guys’ group early on, but then things went south, as they inevitably do in the zombie apocalypse. The bottom line is that people will trade anything for a sense of security.
And that’s when they come across a burnt greenhouse, and Diabetic Tina goes running into it in a panic. It seems she knew the people who lived there, who are now very much burnt and very much encased in melted glass. Diabetic Tina lays flowers on the glass corpses only to get her fool self ate.
Oh, Diabetic Tina, you dummy. Seriously, how did you survive the apocalypse this long?
As Daryl and D dig Diabetic Tina a grave, Daryl asks D Rick’s three questions: How many walkers has he killed: a couple dozen. How many people has he killed: None. Why: Because then there’d be no going back. Fair enough! Daryl invites them to come live in Alexandria with him and his friends and they’re like, “Sure! Why not!”
But when he leads them back to his motorcycle, D pulls his gun on Daryl and is like, “Yeah, we’ll be taking this and your crossbow. SORRY.” “You’re gonna be,” promises Daryl because NO ONE TAKES DARYL DIXON’S CROSSBOW.
And now we have to wait to get back both the crossbow and Glenn.
But all is not lost: Daryl finds a truck from the A.A. Pattrick Fuel Co., license plate “PATTY,” hidden in the woods. He kills the walker driver and starts it right up because batteries have endless life in the zombie apocalypse.
Daryl drives back into town and picks up Sasha and Abraham who is wearing a Marine uniform for some reason. As they head back to Alexandria, they try calling Rick on the radio, but instead of Rick they get another man calling back: “HELP.”
First things first: that voice over the radio, it’s got to be Glenn, right? OBVIOUSLY, IT’S GLENN.
Well, according to Norman Reedus, no, it’s not Glenn.
Instead, Reedus suggests that it’s coming from Alexandria, which is very likely in still more trouble if that crack we saw in the previous episode is any indication. Another option is that it is one of the bad Truck Guys trying to lure Daryl, Sasha and Abraham into a trap.
Still, Reedus could just be practicing a little Eastmanism and serving us up a little redirection, so don’t give up hope, y’all.
As for the other developments in this episode, if you were wondering who the truck guys were, we can talk about it, but it is going to involve some comic spoilers, so proceed at your own risk. Scroll over if you don’t mind being spoiled. In the comics, the herd swarms Alexandria killing many (including Rick’s new love interest and her kid) (oh, and Carl gets his eye shot out, but lives), but the survivors are eventually able to fend them off. After, the Alexandrians resecure the neighborhood and are approached by a man from another community, called the Hilltop Colony, who wants to establish trade with them — and get their help against a predatory group called the Saviors. The Saviors are run by a man named Negan, and they demand half of the Hilltop Colony’s supplies and rations under the threat of violence. So it’s probably safe to presume that D, Honey and Diabetic Tina were from the Hilltop Colony and the truck guys were Saviors. In the comics, when the Alexandrians confront the Saviors, Negan kills Glenn with a barbed-wire wrapped baseball bat named Lucille. The show has just cast Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Negan — so even if Glenn does survive the dumpster, he may still end up dead sooner rather than later.
Also, there is some speculation that D in this episode might be a comic character named Dwight, who is a Savior and uses a crossbow. In the comics, Negan burns Dwight’s face with an iron after Dwight sleeps with Negan’s wife. Could the woman that D is with in this episode be Negan’s wife? If this is Dwight, I should note that in the comics, Dwight kills Abraham with a crossbow during a raid on Alexandria. (But it’s not Daryl’s crossbow because Daryl isn’t in the comics.) YIKES.
Finally, a little easter egg for you kids: the mossy walker who attacks Daryl in the woods has a flower growing out of his back, a Cherokee Rose. It’s a callback to the second season episode, “Cherokee Rose,” in which after Sophia goes missing, Daryl gives Carol a Cherokee Rose. Daryl tells Carol the story of how the flower is a symbol of hope, said to spring from the tears of Cherokee mothers who lost their children on the Trail of Tears. I’m not saying that the Cherokee Rose is a symbol of hope that Glenn is still alive, but Glenn is still alive, y’all.
The Walking Dead airs Sundays on AMC at 8 p.m.
This post originally appeared on the Hearst site Chron.com.