The Walking Dead: Inmates Recap

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkTN3AAsWs8]

The Walking Dead: Inmates (4×10)

Synopsis: We’re brought up to speed on the rest of the people forced to flee the prison in the wake of the Governor’s attack.

Rating: ★★★☆☆

I think that the “everyone is separated, let’s see how they’re doing!” thing has already worn out its welcome with me. This episode just felt kind of “meh” to me, a rehash of the same thing we saw last week with different characters. Opening with a Beth narration, reading from diary, we watch how she and Daryl escaped from the prison battle. Are we supposed to be getting a Daryl/Beth vibe? I feel like both her and Tyreese took weird jumps in their characterization like it jumped in and out from day to night the entire episode as we go backwards and forwards in time with the characters.

The fate of Judith is finally revealed – Tyreese took her, the sap, along with Mica and Lizzie, though they did save his life. They start settling down for the night, but when Judith won’t stop crying they get spooked that she’ll bring about walkers. Daryl and Beth come across this campsite in their earlier tracking ventures and we all see a questionable dead animal in the log that Lizzie was sitting on. In a weird night to day cut, they survive the night and come across the same grapes Beth was picking (after they’d been there) as well. Baby Judith also aged a hell of a lot with that mouth full of teeth on her.

In the morning, lil Asskicker is still crying all the time and Mica continues to be nervous about how that’ll attract walkers to their location. It’s a pretty good bet because when Tyreese leaves them to go save some ambiguous screamers, two walkers find Lizzie and Mica based on Judith’s crying. He’s fighting walkers off of these two guys while Mica is begging Lizzie to help her. Lizzie’s too busy enjoying suffocating a baby to notice, so it’s good news that Carol shows up to save them both and return them to Tyreese!

This is the same scene that Daryl and Beth stumbled upon, where Daryl killed the (now-walker) man who told Tyreese’s group to follow the tracks. Carol is momentarily scared, but word of her turning Karen into crispy bacon never reached Tyreese, who is overjoyed to see her. Why they didn’t take pity on that poor, sobbing old man and put him out of his misery so he wouldn’t come back and feast on his son, I’ll never know.

Sasha, Bob, and Maggie all made it out alive together, with Maggie hellbent on finding Glenn and the bus. Sasha just wants to find food and shelter; she’s not even concerned with finding Tyreese. Lauren Cohan’s accent was a little rough while she was going on and when she stormed off, leaving Sasha and Bob no choice but to follow her. Sasha continues to be grumpy to Bob’s good-natured-ness. Hey, at least he wasn’t the last man standing of this group, right? Right?

They find the bus and it looks like it’s been dusty and abandoned for years. Oh, and it’s also full of zombies. Before Maggie can release them all to see if walker-Glenn is inside, Bob and Sasha talk her into releasing one at a time out of the back of the bus. That plan goes to hell after two kills, with Sasha unable to keep the door closed on the bus and all of them spilling out. Bob and Sasha start killing them while Maggie gets her bearings, violently smashing the head of one walker on the side of the bus. None of the ones that come tumbling out of the back of the bus were Glenn, so Maggie has to climb onto the bus to see if he’s in there. One vaguely Glenn-looking walker is still on the bus and Maggie stabs it in the head, crying and then starting to laugh.

Obviously, it wasn’t Glenn. But Glenn is still in a world of shit on his own. He wakes up in the bombed out prison and finds himself just above the chaos of walkers that the battle attracted. Pulling out his riot gear suit, he looks as if he’s about to give up when he sees a picture of Maggie. It inspires him to put that gear on and run through the walkers like a man on a mission. The behind the riot gear helmet Glennvision is pretty great for this part.

He actually spots Tara as he’s running out of the prison, sitting alone in a protected cage of some kind. She has all her bullets in her gun – didn’t even fire at all. Glenn needs her, so he Molotov cocktails a car to distract the walkers while they escape the prison. Once they’re free, she lets him know, through some panicked rambling, that the Governor killed Hershel. He tells her about Maggie, calling her his wife, and how Hershel was her father and he was a great man. He struggles to kill some zombies, which she eventually helps him do, and then he collapses on the ground. A vehicle approaches and three people get out as the episode ends.

Takeaways from this episode include the fact that Carol has taught Lizzie way too well about survival, Mica misses walkers from like two feet away and will never survive – but please don’t give us a Sophia situation with that running away – and Maggie is also having a breakdown like Michonne. Also, from watching Talking Dead, I found I liked Tara’s actress a lot more than I thought I would. And Abraham is finally here! ABRAHAAAAAAAAAAAM.