It’s apocalypse time! This week on The Walking Dead we’re having an old-fashioned country doctor jamboree as Rick carries his buckshot-riddled eight-year-old toward the little house on the prairie like a sack of root vegetables.
I’m no big city veterinarian but that’s probably why he’s got all the internal bleeding! By the way the doctor they find is a veterinarian because in apocalypse situations GPs are like ephemeral wisps that pass from the world like so many fallen leaves but cat doctors have skin of leather and a heart of tempered steel.
Image via Mamapop
But first, alarmingly condensed and relevant flashbacks! Shane continues to make it awfully clear that should anything, you know, happen to young Richard, well the thing that he would do is not worth typing.
This scene also establishes Lori’s self-defined role in their relationship as the “irrational bitch” (no foolin’, this is the thing she says), which this show certainly agrees with! Rick, conversely, is all strong and silent and moody and a great role model. This is also the flashback to when he was shot and she has to tell Carl about it. Anyway, in the now times the tables are turned and Carl has been shot through a deer by a guy who used to be in Deadwood.
Rick is somewhat distressed that his wife doesn’t know about their son, because he is incapable of prioritising. He will also make a few blood transfusions for his son, as he is the only one with the correct blood type, then spend most of the episode being all man I’ve gotta run away fight zombies. This guy.
Meanwhile in the woods – why is this even here. The characters who did not have anything to do in this episode wander around the woods mumbling at each other because they are looking for a child without being able to shout for her, which is not a great tactic.
Andrea gets attacked by a single zombie, trips backward over a tree root, and just as she is about to get ate one of the folk from the farm smashes it with a baseball bat while riding on a horse like a post-human Old Spice Guy.
The other chaps have heard Andrea screaming and hit the scene all like ‘oh huh a baseball bat wielding horsewoman, neat.’ To her credit, horsebatlady shrugs it off as if zombie polo is just part of her Tuesday afternoon, and tells Lori that Carl’s been shot and she needs to get there post-haste because who else is going to ruin everyone’s calm and make unreasonable demands of her medical service in an apocalypse situation? Not me.
Image via BestWeekEver
Back at the farm Rick is telling everyone how strong Lori is, which is necessary because there’s no evidence of it. Rick himself is fairly losing it on account of being the Bad Decision Depot until Shane gets his bro on and holds him close and they touch foreheads and oh my goodness it’s intense and did I mention there are two other people in the room at this point, not three yards away? They’re sitting there the whole time. Awkward.
Then Doc comes in and says Carl’s fine, for now, except not, because there are five, specifically five, pieces of shrapnel embedded in him, each shrapnellier than the last. He’ll need Shane and Deadwood to go to a FEMA place and grab some equipment. I am sure it will all go according to plan!
Nope, they find all the equipment but get trapped in a building because their plan, Operation Distract Zombies With Flares did not take into account that Flares Do Not Last Very Long. How did these people survive? Anyway, Deadwood is almost certainly going to die next episode, because he is fat in a high-density-zombie situation.
There’s also some stuff with T-Dogg, who is quite reasonably concerned about the impact of decades-worth of mass-media representations of disaster situations in which the only black person dies has had on the group’s mentality. Then it turns out he was delirious from fever. So that’s okay. Then Daryl turns up with Merle’s drug stash and gives him a bunch of surgical-grade antibiotics and his arm will be fine? Were we that concerned about T-Dogg? Not as much as Carl, certainly. Or Sophia.
So! Next week we will find out whether Shane and Deadwood get back from Zombie High to deliver surgery tools to the vet, if T-Dogg is going to be okay and maybe actually advance the plot on Sophia’s disappearance. The Walking Dead! First, backstory:
How are you surviving this series? Ready to run out into the streets with a hatchet? Let us know in the comments.
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October 31, 2011
TV