@lcfremont recaps…
Alright Walking Dead Family, we are back to our main group as they deal with the fallout from the horn going off and distracting the walkers. Our episode opens with Glenn running through the woods and it will go places that none of us are emotionally prepared to go.
Rick, Michonne, Glenn, Nicholas, Heath and other Alexandria residents are trying frantically to get back towards home, but they find numerous obstacles along the way. Rick tells Michonne and Glenn that not everyone will make it back home and Corey overhears this conversation which will plant the seed for him not trusting Rick. This will also be the first obvious foreshadowing of the episode. The Walking Dead has never been a show known for it’s subtlety and Thank You is no exception.
Starting off with the death of some random guy who was silly enough to question Rick sets the tone for an hour of t.v. full of death and rife with heartbreak. While Abraham and Sasha keep on hanging out in the car, everyone else is in panic mode and Daryl, specifically, is torn between keeping the horde of walkers on the road and heading back to Alexandria to help. Daryl has been consistently questioning Rick since they arrived in Alexandria and I’m beginning to wonder when it will all come to a head.
During some down time on the trek back home, Tobin shares his story with Michonne and it’s a sad moment of heartfelt honesty about meeting people who change you for the better. (Foreshadowing) As Nicholas seems to go in and out of lucidness, he is constantly confronted with people who either abandon the group or people who he abandoned in the past. (Foreshadowing)
Meanwhile, Rick is doing his best Tom Cruise impersonation by running a lot and taking out a bunch of people on his own. Glenn tells him over walkie talkie what his plan is to distract the herd. He also tells him, “If you don’t see smoke, they’re still coming your way. I gotta go. Good luck, dumbass.” (Foreshadowing) If you’ll remember, Glenn and Rick met via walkie talkie back in downtown Atlanta and Glenn called him a dumbass then too.
Remember when Rick declared that not everyone was going to make it back home to Alexandria? Remember when we thought that only referred to the random residents of Alexandria that conveniently pop up when we need characters to die? Glenn’s head has been on the proverbial chopping block for a while now and everything in this episode seemed to be leading up to his moment on top of that dumpster with Nicholas, but it was still shocking.
Glenn put too much faith in Nicholas and as he followed him through town, he was also following him to his death. Or was he? Nicholas suffered another episode of momentary insanity right before he shot himself, falling into the group of walkers and taking Glenn with him. In a moment of television that will be scrutinized many times over, Glenn clearly falls on to the ground with Nicholas on top of him. Is it really too much to hope that the entrails we see the walkers feasting on belong to Nicholas? Of course Glenn is screaming and crying. You would be doing the same thing if you just wanted to get back home to your wife and now this asshole is on top of you being eaten. At the end of the day, (I hate that phrase) we did not explicitly see Glenn die and between Nicholas being an unreliable narrator and Glenn outlining two separate signals, one to Michonne and one to Rick, it’s possible that he may still find a way out of this. This is a truly awful way for an original member of the group to go out. Surely, Glenn has earned a more ceremonious death and how many times can we possibly put Maggie through not seeing her loved one when everyone reunites? We can go round and round about all of this until we see Glenn again as promised by show runner Scott Gimple. Will it be in the form of a walker a’la Merle or is he alluding to a potential bun in the oven? The only thing I’m certain of right now is that we probably won’t know for another week because it looks as though the 90 minute episode we’re getting next week focuses on Morgan. Why do you do these things to us TWD? WHY?!
“There’s gunfire coming from back home. We gotta sit with it and hope they can handle it. I think they can. They have to. We keep going forward for them. We can’t turn back because we’re afraid. This is for them. Going back now before it’s done, that would be for us.” Oh Rick, why do you always have to be right? It’s true. They have to finish this mission to keep everyone back at Alexandria safe and we all know that Glenn would rather sacrifice himself than put Maggie in harm’s way.
This episode is titled “Thank You.” Thank you for an education in over indulging in foreshadowing? Thank you for not killing off the minority characters? Thank you for finally disposing of Nicholas? Certainly there will be no “thank you’s” for what Glenn went through. Is he dead? Who rightly knows at this point. In The Walking Dead universe, there is always the possibility of convenient circumstances allowing for Glenn to survive and, personally, I would be just fine with that. What do you think? Please, share your thoughts and feels with me on Twitter.
Sidenotes:
Heath trying to tell Michonne that being on runs is somehow equivalent to what our group has been through was maddening.
Why is Sasha still here? For someone who kept trying to get herself killed, she sure it resilient.
Those balloons on the RV are so sad looking.
We only know exactly where Daryl was at the beginning of the episode and the end of the episode. In between all of that, he was on the road on his own mission.
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