The Walking Dead – Episode 4.14 – ‘The Grove’ Review & Discussion

There are fewer things creepier than a scene combining a child with the dead. It intermingles innocence and the present with tragedy and the past. Horror films often depict such a combination – whether it’s a child ghost, as in "The Shining;" a child playing with an evil object, as in "Chucky;"  or a child that’s become the undead, as in "Interview with the Vampire."  And this is why the opening scene to "The Grove," showing Lizzie running around the yard with the walker as if it were a game, with music from the 1940s sadly playing in the background and the scene shot from the normalcy of a kitchen, was absolutely chilling and absolutely perfect.

"The Grove" dealt with walkers and with people’s coping mechanisms. But it also dealt with ghosts, with making room for tragedy, and changing to adapt to a new world where the dead no longer rests but intermingles with the living. Tyreese is haunted by dreams of Karen, seeing her in cities before the world changed, and sometimes dreams of her death at the hands of a stranger. He tells Carol, “The people who are living are haunted by the dead. We are who we are. And we do what we do because they’re still here, in our heads, in the forest. The whole world is haunted now. And there’s no getting out of that. Not until we’re dead.”

But Carol responds: “Maybe they’re not haunting us. Maybe, maybe they’re just teaching us. Helping remind us, so that we can live with what we have to do.” Carol’s point of view is that everyone changes. Instead of fighting the world, the ghosts help them to adapt. In watching The Grove, we’re reminded that Carol’s loss of Sophia, and told that she thinks of Sophia every day. She has just changed and made room for that pain in her life. This reminded me of something Andrea said to Beth in season two. When Beth was struggling with the death of her mother and accepting the world as it was, and considering suicide, Andrea talks about loss and says that the pain doesn’t totally go away. You just make room for it.

A Society Without Institutions

This episode also brought to a head a question that has been slowly building throughout the season, and that is, what do you do with people who can’t fit in with the group anymore, with the absence of social institutions and structures? With the situations of Carol and Karen and David, and now Lizzie, the show has explored some interesting ethical questions this season. With no hospitals and infection wards, Carol took it upon herself to end Karen and David’s life for the good of the group. With no justice system, Rick took it upon himself to exile Carol for what she did to Karen and David, and for the good of the group. And with no mental institutions, Carol and Tyreese made the heart-wrenching decision to kill a child who was too dangerous to be around other humans.

Who is right here and who is wrong? While Carol’s point of view seemed the most sympathetic in this episode, Mika brought up a different point of view – one more similar to what Hershel preached, and that is that she feels sorry for bad people because they probably weren’t like that before. But to Carol, this sympathy is the worst type of weakness. She says about Mika that she doesn't have “a mean bone in her body,” the same line she used about Sophia, and says that worse than Lizzie.

We’ve seen a lot of different coping mechanisms, and as fans we've tried to put labels on them as “right” or “wrong.” Shane’s method of kill-first seemed more wrong than Dale’s method of refusing to budge with his moral code, yet in some ways Shane’s methods seemed wiser. Rick coped at first by trying to hold onto some order from his former life by wearing the sheriff deputy’s uniform, and then by escaping into insanity and denial. Hershel coped by finding a purpose and spreading hope.

This week we saw two additional examples of coping explored further. Carol has taken the pain from her loss and accepted that it has changed her. She’s stronger now, and she also doesn’t flinch from doing what she sees as necessary. It had become her mission to learn from her mistakes – not making Sophia strong enough to survive on her own – by training the girls to defend themselves against walkers. Lizzie, on the other hand, you could say either coped in a very unhealthy way, or never really coped at all. Whether there was always something off about her, or whether she changed with the apocalypse, we don’t know, although it seemed to be implied that she had always had issues. But either way, she was unable to distinguish between the living and the dead and thought that the dead were just playmates and just different.

Episode Thoughts

What an episode, and what a character arc for Carol! This episode, written by showrunner Scott Gimple, was intense from beginning to end, and tragic and disturbing to a degree that you rarely see on TV. The moment when Carol and Tyreese return to find Mika with hands and knife covered in blood, Mika lying dead nearby, and Judith in line to be the next potential victim, was chilling. Melissa McBride (Carol) and Chad L. Coleman (Tyreese) delivered stand-out performances, with their silent acceptance that Lizzie needed to be killed, and then again later as Carol tells Tyreese that she killed Karen. But the scene most tragic and heartbreaking was the one where Carol was forced to kill Lizzie. Look at the flowers, she tells her – something Mika had said to Lizzie earlier, apparently mimicking their mother in efforts to calm down Lizzie from a manic state.

As horrible as this story was (and I mean that in a good way), I couldn’t help feeling relieved and touched at the end by Tyreese’s forgiveness. I was so glad the truth came from Carol, rather that Tyreese finding out through a different manner. Tyreese knows, loves, and respects Carol, and now he has some peace in knowing how Karen died and that she didn’t suffer.

And let’s talk about where Carol has come from. In season one, we saw her as a meek, abused wife, who was both protective of her husband when Shane beat him up, but also found some release in continually bashing in his head after he had died. When Sophia disappeared, she retreated into a feeling of helplessness and never took part in the excursions for her daughter. Things changed for her when Sophia was discovered as a walker in the barn. At that point, she started getting stronger. I couldn’t help but note that Carol has grown even more over the course of this season. After she killed Karen and David, she asked Rick not to say anything to Tyreese. The fact that she made the decision to tell Tyreese, knowing that he might kill her and it was unlikely that he would find out by a different manner, shows a true strength to her character.

So is everyone still reeling from this episode? Wow! Two more to come this season.