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Last Night's Walking Dead: Two Zombie Attacks, Catching Up With Maggie, And What's Carl Up To – Episode 5 Recap & Review

Rating: 3.5 Stars

The Review:

We finally start getting some answers with what happened to Maggie and Sasha after the end of the season opener. After having had to go through two spotlight episodes out of the last three, it seems the showrunners are in no hurry to change that trend, so this time we get to focus the bulk of the episode around Maggie at Hilltop, some side time with Carl and Enid get some young couple take a walk through the zombie-infested wilderness time.

In the entire episode there are only two zombie encounters: one after ten minutes, then another at about the twenty-five minute mark. Now granted, the second one is set to some great classical music, but this is a series that's supposed to be about fighting against zombies, and of late there's been a dearth of zombie fighting. Granted, it could be due to the amount of special-effects budget that was used in the season opener during Negan's Gallagher impression, but the season has been atypically Zombie-light.

The storylines are so spread out between the various main characters that it feels like things are just dragging. By the end of the episode the pieces are beginning to show the signs of moving into place. Unfortunately with the show's writers taking a full hour to cover Carol and Morgan meeting King Ezekiel and Shiva, and another hour to watch Daryl being browbeaten into deciding if there are five lights or only four, it had been feeling like it could be a while before we actually get back to any substantive story arc progression. As an early Thanksgiving present, at the very end of the episode Carl, of all people, has finally taken some initiative and is headed towards getting that story arc kicked back into gear.

The Recap:

WARNING – Spoiler Alert: After this point, specific story details will be discussed. If you have not yet watched the episode, you may want to hold off and then come back after you have.

It's taken three episodes, but the story has finally decided it was time to let us in on what happened to Maggie and Sasha after the events in the season opener. They made it to back to Hilltop where Maggie, under Dr. Carson's care, is able to repair a separation of placenta from her uterus. While it was serious, he says she should recover and be able to carry to term – as long as she takes it easy.

It turns out the bodies of Abraham and Glenn have been brought to Hilltop and given a burial, with an emotional moment with Maggie standing over the graves. Two beats later Hilltop's leader Gregory comes out furious that Rick and company hadn't kept their promise to wipe out Negan and his crew. He tells Sasha that she can say, but that Maggie has to leave immediately, regardless of the doctor's directives.

About half of the rest of the episode is made up of Gregory insisting that she leave, and Jesus and Sasha pushing for her to be allowed to stay. Negan's Saviors instigate the main walker attack of the episode when they open the gates to Hilltop and cranking up one of the car's radios blasting classical music. As things begin to look dire though a lack of leadership in the defense, Maggie proves that she remembers what she learned growing up on a farm by mowing down walkers in droves while driving a John Deer tractor. Between the music and the use of the tractor, it's the coolest zombie elimination scene we've had in a long while.

The other storyline of the episode is the one in which Enid decides to walk all the way from Alexandria to Hilltop to find Maggie. Not wanting to miss out on any more screen time, Carl decides to go with her on the journey. Along the way they start to hold hands, and Young Love begins to blossom (since every season requires at least one romantic-interest pairing, and since Rick and Michonne are already paired up, Carl was next on the to-do list for the writers). Of course to increase their speed and cute-factor, Carl finds a backpack along the road which just happened to contain two pairs of roller skates which perfectly fit both he and Enid (just imagine the odds).

While they survive the attack, the next morning Gregory still insists that Maggie can't stay when the Saviors arrive in full force. Jesus manages to hide Maggie and Sasha, while Gregory was going to give them up, but they still manage to take the Savior's tithe of half of everything.

Carl and Enid have a brief moment as they reach Hilltop and Carl finally gets a first kiss. Unfortunately the moment passes quickly and Carl looks meaningfully at the camera and talks of going to kill Negan. They then part as Enid heads off to find Glenn's grave (how did she know which grave was his, or that he'd wound up being buried there), and Carl goes off to climb into one of the Savior's trucks.
Gregory's general ineffectiveness causes Jesus to begin to rethink who should be running Hilltop. When Gregory asks if Jesus should run the community, he responds with a no, it wouldn't be any surprise if Maggie weren't running things within a few episodes.

"This is our home now, so you'll learn to call me by my name," Maggie says to Gregory as they confront his having tried to give her over to the Saviors. She's lost Glenn, but she hasn't lost herself, or her drive to continue onward. Whenever Negan meets his end, it feels that she won't be far away, and it won't surprise at all if she's not the one standing over him at the end.

At the end of the episode Sasha sends Jesus off to try to track down Negan's base of operations. As he gets to the truck and climbs inside (it seems that for all of the dozens of raiders the Saviors send along on these runs, they don't take much care to guard the trucks), and he doesn't seem very surprised to find Carl looking back at him from the depths of the truck's cargo (it's a good ting that the person that just climbed into the back was an ally otherwise Carl just gave himself away). At least Jesus will be there to try to keep Carl from getting himself into too much trouble (or he'll be the sacrifice to make sure Carl can get away).

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