This episode of The Walking Dead was crazier than Dale Horvath’s eyes. After binge watching True Detective this past week I didn’t think I could handle another slowburn tale of horror. I don’t even do recaps of TWD anymore but for this one I just gotsta. Maybe not a full recap but at least some reflection, ya know, to process my feelings and stuff now that I’ve seen…
OF MICE AND THE WALKING DEAD.
***SPOILERS AHEAD***
Scott Gimple has done a tremendous job with season 4. I spent most of seasons 2 and 3 griping about the claustrophobia of the farm, prison, and even Woodbury. One of the best parts of apocalyptic fiction is to see a world devoid of people and everyday locations reimagined. Dynamic settings and protagonists on the move is why stories like Zombieland and The Stand will never get old.
And this season continues to move around. Not only did the Governor’s prison bomb scatter everyone all over rural Georgia, each small group keeps moving. Most of them are making their way to the mysterious end zone called Terminus, and this episode The Grove focused on the journey of Carol, Tyreese, baby Judith, and those two little blonde girls Lizzie and Mika Samuels.
The show starts off by giving us some quality time with Carol and Lizzie Borden while the other sleep. The pattern for the first few scenes is Carol attempting to make her adopted daughters better survivors as we learn that Mika is sweet and cool, kind of like a mini Beth. What we learn about Lizzie is that she’s insane. Basic interaction example:
Everyone in the rational world: Lizzie, do you understand?
Lizzie: Yes, I understand*.
*If by understand you mean am I certain that the best way to handle things is to start murdering people but not hurting their brains. Check.
We’ve already known the young lady had issues since she used to feed walkers outside the prison. Her delicacy of choice is live mouse sushi, and she gets back to feeding a broken zom on the train tracks near the opening leading our crew to the titular grove where a lovely house, apparently complete with a working gas oven, awaits their arrival.
Other red flags include Lizzie’s total meltdown as little sister tries to calm her by getting her to focus on pretty flowers in the well-kept apocalypse garden. By the time we see her playing ring-around-the-rosy with a snarling flesh-eater the situation is apparent that Lizzie has problems. But it’s the apocalypse right? Who DOESN’T have issues.
Just when Carol thinks an attack by a zombie horde has shown her young protege the way, Tyreese and Carol return from a stroll in the grove to find Lizzie holding a bloody blade next to her little sister’s corpse.
Did I mention this show hasn’t stopped shocking me yet? She wanted to help her and was careful to not hurt the brain. It’s all way more terrible than it sounds.
Carol and Tyreese realize no one is safe as long as Lizzie is around, so Ms. Peletier walks the troubled girl into the grove to another patch of posies. This is where the story goes all Steinbeckian, as in Of Mice and Men, and I’m not just talking about shoeboxes full of furry snacks for the living dead.
Carol is George, Lizzie is Lennie. Even the names of the latter are similar, as are their tendency to play with dead things. If you don’t read books there’s a 1939 movie version with Burgess Meredith as Carol, er, George, and Lon Chaney, Jr. as Lennie. As the camera closed in on Carol’s tear-streamed face I almost expected Lizzie to say, “I can see it George!”
And as intense as everything was up to that point, it was a later scene that really got me.
The show was crafted in a way to really bring Carol to the brink of confessing to Tyreese that she had been the one who murdered his girlfriend Karen. Would she? And then she did. And it was beautiful. Because Tyreese forgave her in one of the best scenes of season 4.
He had seen what needed to be done, objectively, with Lizzie. He had no answer. Detached from the emotion of Karen’s death he understood the motivation for killing her. He learned that she had not been callously murdered by a stranger. He learned about the mercy of her final moments. Did he consider how impossible it will be to survive and keep a baby alive without help? Perhaps, but he seemed to be moving on. And if Judith is somehow a part of a cure, Tyreese will one day know that the mercy and forgiveness he offered was a part of his own salvation.
It really is a one way track, this lane to Terminus. Carol can never go back to being a woman able to protect her girl, and Tyreese can never go back to being a man who demands selfish retribution. Won’t it be interesting when Carol encounters Rick at the end of the line and the woman he evicted hands him his child?
Not that they can ever truly find a safe destination though, right? There’s no staying put as The Grove once again demonstrates. Safe havens fall, and sanctuaries get spoiled by the death of their world. And therein the beauty of forgiveness shines brighter than ever.
17 replies on “Thoughts on The Walking Dead ep. The Grove (4.14)”
Amazing episode!
Instantly one of the most memorable.
I would say the first red flag was when Lizzie almost suffocated baby Judith. She had a cold look in her eyes.
For weeks I kept suggesting that maybe Carol never really killed Karen but was covering for Lizzie. Given the way they handled her eventual confession I’m glad I was wrong.
Clay great insights into a heart pounding episode. It’s amazing how themes like forgiveness pop up in unexpected places!
Gotta admit I stifled a tear in the space between Carol’s words and Tyreese’s response. Those characters skyrocketed in my estimation over the final ten minutes of that episode.
When Carol told Lizzie to “look at the flowers” (which I think might become a household phrase now thanks to this episode) I half expected Beth and Daryl to come walking around the bend, either preventing Carol from doing the deed, or witnessing it and leaving her to explain this whole mess. And quite a mess it is.
I didn’t expect that but it sure would’ve been something. It’s such a terrible thing. I was thinking about the nature of justice in a world like that. Even if you take the idea of God away, what happens when someone murders an innocent person? We’ve seen plenty of that but it’s usually in these turf wars, not a situation where someone from within just merrily commits the act. By going there they forced the issue. Still though, I felt more emotionally drawn by the scene at the card table near the end.
Also, the definition of “innocent” I believe changes within zombie apocalypse world. In zombieland, you are no longer an innocent person if you are somehow a threat to others or to yourself. Karen and David were, by our definition, “innocent,” but their illness threatened the safety of the entire prison. Was what Carol did murder? Yes. Were they innocent? Carol didn’t think so, and therefore she felt she was justified. Even Tyreese saw it after everything with Lizzie went down. Would Rick have been justified in offing Carol, the way Carol did with Lizzie?
Unfortunately for poor Lizzie, justice is served based on what resources are available to keeping the Greater Good safe, not necessarily on what is morally right. It’s definitely a frightening thought.
Here’s the problem for me. The message of the episode, repeated multiple times, was that you don’t survive unless you are “mean” and able to do horrible things. This is said explicitly.
So why is Tyreese forgiving Carol seen as a good thing? In the world of the Walking Dead it’s a weakness. No doubt in the next couple of episodes we’ll see that Tyreese’s good nature and desire to help others will end with him dead. Expect an episode explaining his backstory and making us like him more followed by him, I don’t know, sacrificing himself for the group and getting eaten like a deer.
Also, Robert Kirkman is sitting around trying to think of way to shock people. He’s gleefully rubbing his hands together and saying “This should get people talking!” Screw him. Ripping off the framework for ‘Of Mice and Men’ and failing to reflect the moral nature and beauty of that story in favor of “Let’s kill some kids and get people talking” is the worst kind of writing possible. I get the feeling the show writers are constantly fighting to balance Kirkman’s essential desire to destroy things with being actual human beings with moral compasses.
You know what, Kirkman? You want to show some guts and get some people talking? Kill Rick. Break off from the comic’s narrative. Or try to reflect the reality of human beings in true catastrophic events of history, where good people do sometimes survive not just because they are lucky but because they are heroes.
So you’re saying you didn’t like the episode. jkjk. I have a feeling when we do a StoryMen extra for season 4 you might be saying this was the year you part ways with TWD.
Yes, they explicitly have been stating that more and more, that good people don’t survive. Daryl said it straight out to Beth a couple shows back. That’s been a them since season 2 really, that the moral compass dies, which has frustrated me since Dale went down. The reason I don’t find contradiction in appreciating Tyreese’s forgiveness or see it as a weakness is because killing Carol wouldn’t be a step towards surviving. Nor would allowing Lizzie to hang around forever threatening the live of Judith or others. It’s a horrific situation. I don’t know about others I’ve seen in the past couple days who say this is one of the best episodes ever, but for me it was really about that ending and Carol’s confession and his response. But you might be right about Tyreese going down.
You’re right about Kirkman, he overdoes the “all good must die” part. That’s why a book like The Stand is so much better, because it allows for good vs. evil rather than “there is no good.”
I don’t have any issue with you as an audience member enjoying the forgiveness moment. For me, in the world of the Walking Dead, the emotional connection is dying. Saying that someone is forgiving or kind or good is marking them for something evil. In the same episode that Beth is pointed out as being good, she’s kidnapped. If you look at the overall narrative arc of the show at this point, it’s so muddy that it’s hard to know if we’re meant to feel that the forgiveness is something good or something frightening. (i.e. are we supposed to be relieved that Carol isn’t murdered? Or scared now that Tyreese has done something good and must be punished soon.)
In traditional horror, evil happens to those who (in some way) deserve it in the narrative. In Walking Dead, trying to be a good person is what marks you for death.
This is why Glen’s fate might be my tipping point. He’s beloved enough by the fans that he might be “safe” to some degree. If they can’t find a better narrative than the comic, though, I’ll be done.
All that to say: I wouldn’t want to be locked in a building with Kirkman if the electricity went out.
Wow Matt, how do you really feel? 😉 Lizzie needed to die and she did. Whew. Glad that was over. Carol needed to confess and she did. All in all a good episode in my book.
Bahahaha.
Do you think Carl deserves to die any less than Lizzie? I mean, I like Carl but he totally killed that other kid in cold blood after he had already surrendered.
Lizzie was a psychopath. Carl’s just a dumb kid. Who really deserves to live? But if they kill Daryl, well, let’s not even go there…
#1 Matt said “screw him”. That’s almost as shocking to me as TWD.
🙂
Anyway, I couldn’t watch it, but I read the episode synopsis, and also never read/saw OMAM, so maybe I’m wrong on this. But it seems different to me because George kills Lenny out of compassion for Lenny, I thought. And it sounds like Carol killed Lizzy for her (and other’s) own protection. That difference in motivation seems important. Same with killing Karen. Not sure where she’s headed, but it’s interesting to witness Carol’s journey really. This is not the shrinking battered woman we met, or the “I won’t leave without my daughter” (but I’ll never go out and look for her myself because I’ve got cooking and laundry to do) mother on the farm.
Each season has it’s central theme, and only having read about s4, I can’t really pin this one down. But from start to finish TWD is about who we want to be. Who these characters choose to be. No matter what happens, what we’re faced with, we choose who we are every moment. Sanity permitting. 🙂
I like happy endings and I want good to triumph over evil. I don’t really think TWD wants to give me that, but I keep watching because I can’t help but hope for hope in that world. I think I’ll be done with the show when they leave me no more room for hope.
Ha ha ha. I was pretty mad.