Photo: AMC
It’s flu season on The Walking Dead! And boy is it a doozy. That’s what killed the nerdy young Patrick last week, a death that immediately sparks a rather gruesome massacre in Cell Block D. This particular strain of flu apparently makes your face explode, and can be fatal within 24 hours even for young and healthy people — which would be dangerous enough on its own even if it didn’t immediately turn their corpses into dangerous killing machines. When you consider that the 1918 Spanish Flu pandemic managed to infect a third of the global population and kill an estimated 50 million people, it’s not looking great for our survivors.
And as the extinction of humanity looms even larger than before, it’s no surprise that their primary concern seems to be children — both protecting them and protecting their innocence, goals that ultimately prove to be incompatible.
“Why don’t you wear your hat anymore?” Michonne asks as Carl, shortly before hearing the gunshots. “It’s not a farming hat,” Carl replies, because he and Rick are farming farmers who farm now, in case you missed the many, many mentions of their farming over the last two episodes. Accordingly, they don’t wear cowboy hats anymore, nor do they carry guns, all because of an incident where Carl maaaaybe gunned down a (possibly dangerous) stranger in cold blood. Concerned that his son might be taking a one-way trip to Psychotown, Rick is now obsessed with trying to give Carl back his childhood, which in Rick’s mind means 1) farming (obviously) 2) refusing to let Carl take part in any zombie-related duties and 3) insisting he read comic books and go to storytime with the little kids.
Which isn’t entirely fair, and you can see how badly playing the role chafes for Carl. Like many of the survivors, he had to become a very different person in order to stay alive, and he hasn’t really been a child for a long time. But he’s trying with all his heart to act like one anyway because Rick wants him to, because he can tell that his father needs it far more than he does. Rick doesn’t want Carl to carry a gun because he wants to believe that Carl doesn’t need to carry a gun. And of course, that’s not true.
Rick’s stance on Carl having access to a firearm is kind of the like conservative stance on teens having access to contraception; you can refuse to give them the means to protect themselves, but it’s not going to change the reality of the situation — it’s just going to make it more dangerous for them. The difference being that instead of getting an STD, it is far more likely that Carl will die and then turn into a monster and kill everyone around him, so the stakes for parental delusion here are just a little bit higher. Wishing that the world were a safer place doesn’t make it so, and leaving Carl unarmed doesn’t make him safer either; it makes him more vulnerable.
The lone voice of responsible post-apocalyptic parenting here is Carol, who has turned her regular storytime session become a junior clinic in survivalism, switching between reading novels to children and teaching them how to kill with knives. When Carl finds out what’s really going on in between chapters of Tom Sawyer, Carol asks him to keep it a secret from both Rick and the other parents. They might understand why their children need to learn how to use weapons, she says, but they also might not, and she can’t take that risk. Insisting that children remain innocent might sound protective, but by the end of the episode, it’s obvious how irresponsible it is.
Relatedly, Carol promises a dying man (whose name I also do not know, because this season is full of red shirts who live only to die) that she will take care of his children, two girls named Lizzie and Micah. You may remember Lizzie as the total idiot from last week who thought that walkers were people too, a notion so fatally stupid that it’s hard to believe it exists. After her dad dies — and she has a weird tantrum about her favorite Backstreet Boy zombie, Nick, getting killed — it falls to new surrogate mom Carol to deliver some tough love: “It’s time someone told you the truth: honey, you’re weak.”
As Daryl buries the possibly infected bodies with what I’m sure is the most sterile of bandanas wrapped around his face, he thanks Rick for his help during the massacre – and suggests that with the epidemic looming, it might be time for Rick to step up and take a leadership role again. Rick, who desperately wants the post-apocalyptic equivalent of a desk job, declines. “I screwed up too many times,” he says, before trailing off about how hard it is to be the man making the calls. In monomythical terms, this is known as the “refusal of the call” – the reluctance of the story’s hero to embrace his true destiny. (It may also be worth referencing Joseph Campbell’s description of what happens to the hero during this part of the journey: “Whatever house he builds, it will be a house of death: a labyrinth of cyclopean walls to hide from him his minotaur.”)
Danai Gurira as Michonne. Image: AMC/Gene Page
While everyone else who was exposed to the flu quarantines themselves and hopes that their faces will not also explode, Beth watches over baby Judith, singing her the thematically-appropriate Tom Waits song, “I Don’t Want to Grow Up” as a lullaby:
How do you move in a world of fog
That’s always changing things?
Makes me wish I could be a dog
When I see the price you pay
I don’t wanna grow up.
Beth asks Michonne – whose trip to Macon has been sadly postponed by a twisted ankle – if any children died in the massacre, musing that while we have words like “orphan” and “widow,” there’s no word for someone who has lost a child. “You’d think someone would have given that a name.” This particular form of loss seems to strike a chord for Michonne, who reacts poorly to Judith’s crying, and even worse to Beth’s suggestion that she hold Judith for a moment. When she finally does pick up the baby, Michonne unexpectedly breaks down sobbing in a way that suggests that if that particular word did exist, it would probably apply to her.
Meanwhile, things seem to be going well for Tyreese his lady friend, but since experiencing any form of joy on this show seems to be a form of hubris that calls down the wrath of the gods, you know that doesn’t bode well. (Nor does the fact that I still don’t know her name.) She wants to take things a little slower before they move into the same cell, and though he’s obviously crazy about her, Tyreese seems happy to wait. Of course, she soon starts coughing — a symptom of the fast-moving flu — and when he comes to bring her flowers, he finds her gasoline-soaked body burning in a courtyard, presumably killed as a preemptive measure because of the risk she posed to the community. It’s pretty emotionally crushing, but that is also the entire point of the show, as far as I can tell.
The group faces a second crisis when all the gunshots attract so many walkers to the fence that it threatens to buckle under their weight. Finally, Rick finally decides to cut the projected Peter Pan crap and get his shit together. After a wistful look back at his pig sty, he realizes how he can save them all: by dropping a trail of bloodied pigs like really tragic breadcrumbs to lead the zombies away from the prison, a plan that succeeds.
In the aftermath, Carl finally tells Rick about Carol’s little weaponry tutorial, including the fact that she hasn’t told the children’s parents — and that Carl doesn’t think he should try to stop her. Neither does Rick, anymore. “I won’t stop her. I won’t say anything,” he says, right before he throws the match to burn down his pig sty – and likely, the bucolic life he wanted so badly to believe he and Carl could have. Then he not only gives Carl a gun again, but finally puts his own weapon back in its holster. Time to grow up.
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