The Walking Dead: Infected (4×02)
Synopsis: A dangerous threat inside the prison becomes known, jeopardizing everything they’ve all worked so hard to accomplish.
Rating: ★★★★☆
Infected opens with a mysterious figure feeding rats to the geeks outside the gate. Elsewhere, Tyreese and Karen are getting closer, but Karen soon kicks him out of “her place” because she wants to keep some boundaries between them. After he leaves, she has a flashlight and is washing her face in the bathroom where Patrick died. She hears some noise, but misses out on zombified Patrick in the showers and goes back to her cell to sleep. Patrick, however, did not miss her and follows her back to cellblock D. A coughing man draws his attention and he proceeds to chow down on the man without alerting anyone else.
While Patrick is making friends, Glenn and Maggie are up in the guard tower switching off shifts, Rick is waking up Carl for the day, and zombies are crowding the fence outside the prison. Carl offers to help thin out some of the zombies, bur Rick makes sure he knows that they have other plans. They’re feeding the pigs and Carl apologizes, but asks when he can get his gun back. All hell breaks loose when some kids come running out of cellblock D finally alerting them to the zombies on the inside.
Everyone scrambles. Michonne, who was already outside of the gates, tries to come back in as Carl opens the gate for her. She’s attacked on the way, falling and injuring her ankle before she can get away and get inside. They’re trying to weed out the bitten from the rest, mostly women and children first. Carol pulls away a man and begins to amputate his arm, only to find a bite on the back of his neck as well. Rick, Daryl, Glenn, and the rest manage to kill all the roving zombies – with Daryl killing Patrick last.
They check the cells to kill any of the stragglers. Rick takes out a knife and stabs one geek through the bars of a cell, who is revealed to be Charlie – a boy who used to sleepwalk, so he’d lock himself in the cell, clearing him from being bitten before turning. The doctor looks at some of the dead and figures out that they had internal lung pressure built up, bleeding out from the inside and turning from an aggressive flu. It could be seen on Patrick and some of the walkers outside the fences. They slowly realize that that must mean everyone has been infected.
Carol is talking to Ryan, the man whose arm she was going to amputate, who makes her promise to take care of his two kids. She says they have to have the chance to say goodbye and he agrees. When Lizzie and Mica are brought in, he asks them to take care of each other. Carol tries to get them to leave the cell when it’s time, but Lizzie wants to kill him because he taught her how to do it. Carol tries to instruct her to do it before he turns, but she freezes up and Carol ultimately has to kill him while the girls cry.
As soon as Rick gets back out of cellblock D, Carl confesses to having used a gun while Michonne and Maggie were with him. Rick has to tell them about what happened to Patrick and tries to tell them to stay away from him, as he’s been exposed. Back inside the council is meeting – Carol, Hershel, Glenn, Daryl, and Sasha – and Carol says they should separate everyone who is sick. They suggest cellblock A, Death Row, be used when they hear Karen coughing and Tyreese taking her to his cell. They tell Tyreese he shouldn’t do that because of the flu Karen may have. She also tells them that David from the Decatur group has been coughing as well. At the end of the meeting, Daryl offers to bury the dead – to which Hershel reminds him to wear gloves and a mask. Carol asks if he’s okay and all he can say is that he has to be.
Lizzie is upset while Carol is trying to soothe her by explaining that she lost her nerve and she can’t do that again. But it turns out she’s not upset about the death of her father, but the death of the walker she’d named, Nick. As she storms off, Mica tells Carol that she’s not weak, she’s just messed up.
Daryl is burying bodies while Rick looks on, explaining to him that he was glad Rick was there today. Rick, however, thinks he wasn’t any use without his gun and is scared of having to make tough calls for his family. Maggie calls their attention to the fence, where the zombies are piling up and the fence is starting to give. They rush over to start killing them, where Sasha finds half eaten rat bodies and asks what the hell? She doesn’t have much time to dwell on it, as the fence is being pushed down more and more by the sheer pile-up of zombies.
Inside the prison, Beth is bandaging up Michonne’s ankle and insisting that she doesn’t want to know who the dead consist of. Michonne is mad at herself for falling down and getting hurt, verbalizing that they should have left her out there to get bit. Judith, whom Beth takes care of all the time now it looks like, is crying and it is obviously affecting Michonne adversely. Judith spits up on Beth while Michonne is working out and Beth insists Michonne hold her so that she can go and change. After Beth leaves and she’s left with Judith, she begins to cry…
Carl is building grave markers and asks Carol if Patrick was Catholic. Carol tells him that Patrick always said he was a “practicing atheist,” so Carl breaks down the cross he’d built him and asks Carol if she’s told the parents what she’s been teaching their children. She says no and that she’s not going to ask them, insisting that the secret is between her and Carl.
When the fence looks like it is going to be a lost cause, Rick tells Daryl to get the truck. They leave the prison and get close enough to the zombies that they take notice of them and leave the fence. As they get close, rick cuts one of the piglets and lets it go, drawing the zombies in. He gets blood on his face and it obviously affects him, as he kills all the pigs this way.
Carol tries to explain to Lizzie one more time that she feels sad about her dad dying, not Nick, but it doesn’t seem to be working. Rick is taking down the pig pen when Carl comes up to him and he voices his concerns that either the pigs made them sick or they made the pigs sick. Carl tells him about Carol teaching the young kids to use weapons, but thinks that Rick should continue letting her. He relents, saying he won’t stop her, as he lights the pig pen area on fire before giving Carl his gun back. He also puts his own back on and burns his shirt, as he notices zombies coming back to the fence again.
In the final scene, Tyreese is taking flowers to Karen, but finds her cell empty and bloody. He follows the trail out to the yard and finds Karen and David have both been killed and their bodies burned.
English