Spoilers through Season 5 of ‘The Walking Dead’ follow.
Sunday night’s episode of The Walking Dead marks a huge change from previous shows. It also may be the best episode I’ve seen of the show in years, a tremendous tour de force that opened strong and finished with a bang.
Right from the beginning you can tell something is different in the oddly named “What Happened and What’s Going On.” The episode opens to a sequence of disjointed shots. Maggie and newcomer Noah are crying. There’s a funeral—we think, perhaps, it’s for Beth—and shots of the prison, of a skeleton in the forest, of abandoned houses. Train tracks. Even the opening credits are different.
It’s all very dreamlike, and shot beautifully.
That’s little wonder, given it was directed by Greg Nicotero, the special effects guru behind, among many other episodes, the excellent Season 5 premiere. And as excellent as that premiere was, tonight’s episode was even better. And more tragic and terrible. One of the most beautifully shot episodes in the show’s entire run, it was also one of the most heartbreaking.
What Happened
To briefly recap: Rick, Noah, Tyreese, and Michonne head to the town Noah and his family were from—a bastion, it turns out, that is past its expiration date. The town is overrun, though not too many zombies remain. Noah goes to his house with Tyreese, and Tyreese goes in first to clear the way.
He finds himself absorbed in one of the boy’s rooms, and doesn’t react in time when a young walker attacks him, biting his arm. Noah runs for help. Much of the episode takes place as Tyreese experiences the onset of the zombie sickness, something we haven’t really seen before now from this perspective.
It’s a long, protracted hallucination—and both during the hallucination and during Tyreese’s photo-gazing, we begin to see glimpses of what those mysterious opening shots were all about.
The two little blond girls show up, telling Tyreese that everything will be okay. Recently deceased Bob is also there. So is Beth. Which reminds me: in The Walking Dead, black men and blond women are never safe. (Seriously, black women tend to survive, as do women with brown hair and the core white dudes in the cast, but blond chicks and black guys are dropping right and left. Just an observation.)
On the other hand, Tyreese doesn’t hallucinate about his dead girlfriend, even though her death has been the most important and pivotal event in the series for him thus far. So that’s odd.
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Tyreese doesn’t just hallucinate about friends, either. The Governor shows up to berate Tyreese, as does the Termite with the baseball cap that Tyreese lied about killing. It’s an intense moment, and it goes on and on as Tyreese bleeds, until another zombie attacks. He’s forced to jam his bittern arm into the walker’s mouth just to push it off of him enough to deal a killing blow.
Finally Rick and company are alerted of the situation—somehow Noah got pinned by walkers as he raced to tell them, I’m really not sure how*—and they all run to Tyreese’s aid. They fight their way out of the abandoned town and to the car, radioing ahead.
But it’s too late.
I really thought they’d have Tyreese live, to be honest. I thought they’d pull a Hershel and cut the arm off in time, especially given the midseason finale, and Beth’s untimely demise. It’s certainly unexpected to see yet another major character die this quickly, and especially the big teddy bear Tyreese.
I find myself feeling really bad for Sasha, more than anything. In just a few episodes she’s lost both Bob and Tyreese. It’s like the show’s writers have some vendetta against her or something.
