The Walking Dead, “Them,” was written by Heather Bellson and directed by Julius Ramsay. It’s another harrowing episode even if none of our survivors dies, many are on a downward spiral and the group has reached its physical and spiritual limits. The episode is beautifully shot and acted. I have to give a special shout out to Lauren Cohan (Maggie), Sonequa Martin-Green (Sasha), Norman Reedus (Daryl), and Andrew Lincoln (Rick) for particularly riveting performances. Danai Gurira (Michonne), Steven Yuen (Glenn), and Melissa McBride (Carol) have less to do in the episode, but are also outstanding. In fact, it’s hard not to just list the entire cast.
The episode centers on the group’s trip to Washington. Their last faint hope. They are literally dying of thirst and starvation. It’s easy to see a number of clichés or platitudes play out, but this show makes them fresh again with a poignant truth. It would seem the group is wandering in the desert in search of the promised land. Both Beth (Emily Kinney) and Tyreese (Chad L Coleman) arguably having died in sight of it. We could also rely upon it’s always darkest before the dawn.
I can’t say enough about the beautiful cinematography in this particular episode. We get some beautiful shots of the group on the road. The episode opens with a close up on Maggie’s eyes, which pulls out to show her hand – with the wedding ring on it – to her sitting in the forest alone. Can her ties to the world – Glenn – keep her from giving in to her grief and despair? She gets up, emotionlessly kills a walker and sits back down to continue crying. The opening sequence concludes with a beautiful shot of the group sitting on the road around the van in the distance and Maggie, Daryl, and Sasha walking back towards them.
After the van runs out of gas, we see the group walking down the road with the walkers behind them. They aren’t really catching up, but they aren’t going away either. The bridge scene is staged similarly to the opening sequence with the some of the group at one end of the bridge and the others at the other end. When the group is challenges, like with the wild dogs or the water, the shots are more enclosed, giving a sense of almost being trapped. There are a number of beautiful crane shots that give us the entire group to highlight what each character is doing and their relationship to the others.
When Maggie and Sasha come out of the barn to find the devastation all around the barn, it’s an amazing shot. No doubt a triumph of both set decoration, make up, and CGI, but it’s a powerful shot. The final shot of the music box in the foreground and Sasha and Maggie behind it with the dawn behind them is simply gorgeous, and I’ll come back to it later in my review.
We’ve never seen the group in quite such dire straights before. It’s been a day and a half at the beginning of the episode since they’ve had water, and we learn it’s been three and a half weeks since Atlanta. Maggie, Daryl, and Sasha are particularly struggling to come to terms with their grief, which is aptly symbolized by their being separated from the group when we first see them in the episode. Each of them is approached in turn by other members for the group who want to help them find their way through their grief. As they approach the group, Maggie asks, “How much longer we got?” Sasha replies “Sixty miles.” But Maggie tells her, “I wasn’t talking about that.” Maggie wonders how long they have until they either die or lose the will to fight and live. This scene with these two actors beautifully bookends the episode with the last and more hopeful scene of the episode.
Just when it seems things can’t get worse, they do. The van runs out of gas and has to be abandoned. Even when it starts to rain, it turns into a savage storm. Abe (Michael Cudlitz) finds some alcohol and starts drinking it. Tara (Alanna Masterson) remarks “it’s not gonna help. It’s gonna make it worse.” Eugene (Josh McDermitt) replies, “He’s a grown man, and I truly do not know if things can get worse.” Rosita (Christian Serratos) says, “They can.” And they do immediately as the group is set upon by wild dogs.
When Abe offers a drink to Sasha, she too responds by saying “It’ll just make things worse.” Abe tells her, “the way you’re going? You’re what going to make things worse.” Abe is referring to her endangering the others by being reckless. He tries to tell her, “You’re with friends.” To which she replies, “We’re not friends.” The last time Sasha let herself depend on friendship was in last season’s “Alone” when she chose to continue with Bob (Lawrence Gilliard Jr) and Maggie. She’s clearly trying to cut herself off from the group.
Noah (Tyler James Williams) reaches out to Sasha, thinking that she’s like her brother. He tells her, “Your brother tried to help me. I don’t know if I’m going to make it.” Sasha looks at him coldly and tells him, “Then you won’t. Don’t think. Just eat.” Of course, what they’re eating is dog meat. When the wild dogs come out of the forest, the others are afraid but hesitate. They are still civilized enough to remember what it means to have a pet, a friendly, loyal family dog. Sasha doesn’t hesitate and kills them with the silenced sniper rifle.
After Sasha tells Noah to just eat, we have one of the gorgeous crane shots that takes in the entire group. Noah and Sasha are the only ones not eating. The rest are mindlessly focused on eating. On survival. The message is clear: if you think, you die. And this reflect back to how Tyreese died. He stopped to pay witness to the pictures on the wall. He let his guard down, lost in thought, and paid with his life.
Michonne also reaches out to Sasha. Like Abe, she realizes that Sasha’s recklessness will help nobody. Sasha wants to take on the herd following them, but Michonne reiterates Rick’s declaration that they aren’t strong enough for a head on fight. Sasha insists she can take them all on herself – much as Tyreese tried to do in a blind rage after Karen’s death. Michonne tells Sasha, “Your brother was pissed too after what he lost. Made him stupid.” Sasha immediately insists, “We are NOT the same. We never were.” Despite Tyreese having tried to tell Sasha that they were alike, and hearing in last week’s episode how their father made both of them listen to the news. Michonne doesn’t disagree with her, but she tells her “it’s still the same. Just is.” They might not be alike, but they are doing exactly the same thing in reaction to loss.
Rather than start an all out fight with the walkers following them, the group comes up with a plan to simply knock them into a ravine. This was strangely horrifying in its own right. On one side of the bridge was Rick, Glenn, and Michonne and on the other Abe, Sasha, and Maggie. All goes well until Sasha can’t resist the need to actually kill them. Once she starts killing, the other walkers go crazy and it becomes the all out fight they were trying to avoid. Abe exclaims, “Plan just got dicked!” Michonne tries to get Sasha to leave. In the fight, Rick is almost bitten because he’s too weak to fight but Daryl appears out of the woods in the nick of time to save Rick. It’s utterly gruesome when Daryl actually peels the walker’s scalp off as he pulls it away from Rick. In the melee, Sasha manages to cut Abe’s arm. Given that her knife is covered in gore, shouldn’t this be a problem? Will this cut end up being it for Abe? Once the fight is over, Michonne tells Sasha, “I told you to stop,” and Sasha just glares back at her. Michonne knows all about cutting yourself off from everyone, so it makes sense that she would understand what Sasha is going through.
Gabriel (Seth Gilliam) tries to reach out to Maggie. He tries making small talk about hair shirts, and she cuts him off, telling him her Daddy was religious and she used to be. He offers to be there for her if she wants to talk, but she cuts him off, and is as brutally honest with him as Sasha was with Noah. She tells him, “You don’t know shit. You had a job. You were there to save your flock, right? But you hid. Don’t act like that didn’t happen.” Maggie could say the same thing about herself and Beth. Wasn’t she supposed to look out for her sister? Didn’t she hide in her own way by pursuing Glenn and not Beth? Later when they’ve killed the dogs, Maggie watches as Gabriel removes his collar and drops it into the fire. After he does that he begins eating. It’s highly symbolic of giving up his calling, of giving up even trying to help others. Like the others who are mindlessly eating, he stops thinking about anything past simple physical survival.
Glenn, of course, is constantly there for Maggie. When she finds the walker in the trunk, she doesn’t kill it, she simply closes the trunk and walks away. But she can’t just walk away. She still isn’t that kind of person. She’s about to shoot the trunk open in desperation after she can’t get the lock open, and Glenn is right there with his hand on her arm. This is a beautiful parallel to the conversation that Glenn had with Rick last week, when he said that if he came across someone in a cattle car now, he wouldn’t stop for them as he did at Terminus in the season premiere. But here he is. Stopping and releasing the walker, not just for Maggie but because it’s who he is.
Glenn tries to get Maggie to take a drink, and when she won’t drink, he gets her to at least talk to him. Cohan is great in this scene. There’s been a lot of discussion over why Maggie wasn’t more driven to find her sister, and much of that speculation is answered here: “I never thought she was alive. I just didn’t. After daddy, I don’t know if I couldn’t” and there seems to be an unspoken “hope” here. She goes on: “and after what Daryl said, I hoped she was out there alive. And then finding out that she was and the n she wasn’t in the same day. Seeing her like that it made if feel liked none of it was ever really there. Before, this was just the dark part. I don’t know if I want to fight it anymore.” Glenn tells her she does because that’s who she is. He tells her, “maybe it’s a curse nowadays, but I don’t think so. We fought to be here. And we have to keep fighting.” He tells her to drink, and she does.
Glenn, Carol, and Rick reach out to Daryl. Rick tells Daryl, “I know you lost something back there.” Daryl doesn’t talk to Rick about it. But Rick is also a leader, and he knows that losing one of their own, someone Daryl cared about and who was under his protection would affect him deeply. Daryl keeps going off into the woods by himself as he’s always done. It seems to be the place he can find peace. He’s even more cut off from the group and quiet than normal, but he hasn’t given up – as evidenced by his eating a worm in the opening scene. YUK! But, he also clearly needs to help save the group because that’s who he is.
Daryl says he’s going to look for water and Carol says she’ll come. When he tries to put her off, she teases him by saying, “you gonna stop me?” I love these two together. McBride and Reedus are both great in this scene and echoes with their story in “Consumed.” Carol suggest they head back and then adds, “Think she saved my life. She saved your life too, right?” She’s referring to Beth, of course, and she gives Daryl Beth’s knife. She goes on to say, “We’re not dead. That’s what you said. You’re not dead. In know you. We’re different. I can’t let myself…. But you? You have to let yourself feel it.” She then gently brushes his hair off his forehead and kisses his forehead. It’s a very maternal gesture. Reedus face remains blank, but she tells him that he will feel it – in time. It’s also a nice call back to their shared hope and grief over Sophia and how they coped with her death.
Glenn also offers Daryl water. Daryl refuses and Glenn doesn’t succeed in getting him to either drink or talk. Glenn tells him, “We can make it together. But we can only make it together.” We’ve seen that no one makes it on their own for long. Glenn is able to bring Maggie back into the group, and Carol acts as a lifeline for Daryl. For Daryl, it’s important that he fulfill that role as protector. He uses the excuse of going to look for water to withdraw again, however. This time he finds the barn – which will ultimately save the entire group, thus restoring some of his hope.
It’s while he’s looking for water this time that he sits down to smoke a cigarette – the last he got when in Atlanta in “Consumed” presumably. Again, Reedus face is impassive as he smokes and looks at the barn, and then turns the cigarette into his own flesh – burning himself until he feels. And then he is fully able to feel and begin to deal with Beth’s death.
This marks a turning point for the entire group. When he comes back he finds that someone has left water in the road for the group with a note “From a Friend.” The entire group is suspicious, suspecting a trap. The water could be drugged or poisoned. The group has completely lost the ability to trust anyone any more. Eugene points out that if it’s a trap, they’re already in it, and he’s too thirsty to be cautious. It also makes sense for one person to try in and see what happens. But old habits die hard, and Abe saves Eugene from himself by swatting the water out of his hand. I loved how even under extreme duress, our character are who they are and this is reinforced in virtually every scene.
It’s at this point that it finally starts to rain. Gabriel cries and says “My Lord, I’m sorry.” Casting off his collar was symbolic of his loss of faith – and the rain is a perfect counterpart to him burning the collar. Everyone is smiling and laughing, letting the rain wash them clean and quench their thirst All, that is, except Sasha, Maggie, and Daryl. They have come some way on their journey, but they aren’t over their grief either. Daryl is able to offer everyone the shelter of the barn when the storm turns bad.
As they clear the barn, Maggie finds a stack of books with a Bible on the top, and then she finds a walker shut in a room. She kills her. Carol comes up. Maggie marvels that the woman had a gun – “she could have shot herself.” But Carol points out that “Some people can’t give up. Like us.” It emphasizes both the fact that having people will save you, but you also have to have the will to live, to not give up.
The group scatters around the barn, some sleeping, others trying to rest. Glenn, Carol, Michonne, Rick, and Daryl are gathered around the fire. This is a terrific scene. Lincoln is outstanding in what has to be seen as a central scene to the entire season if not the series itself. Rick says, “I used to feel sorry for kids who have to grow up now. In this. But I think I got it wrong. Growing up is getting used to the world. It’s easier for them.” Michonne immediately disagrees: “This isn’t the world. This isn’t it.” Accepting that it’s never going to get better, that it’s never going to get past Maggie’s dark part, is giving up. Is it better to simply accept the world the way it is, not to know that there is any other possibility – kids born into the world of the series wouldn’t know anything of before. Glenn is ready to accept it as reality. This echos the discussion that Beth and Dr Edwards had in “Slabtown” about art and culture.
Rick makes a distinction, however. He says, “Until we see otherwise, this is what we have to live with.” He goes on to tell them the story of how his grandfather made it through WWII. At first, his grandfather tried to shelter him from what happened in the war, but then “I asked him if the Germans ever tried to kill him but he got real quiet. Said he was dead the minute he stepped into enemy territory. Every day he woke up he told himself rest in peace. Now get up and go to war. And then after a few years of pretending he was dead, he made it out alive. And that’s the trick of it, I think. We do what we need to and then we get to live. No matter what we find in DC, I know we’ll be ok. Because this is how we survive. We tell ourselves that we are the walking dead.” As he said the last line, I swear I got goosebumps!
As he says ‘after a few years of pretending to be dead’ the camera is on Daryl. The camera pans to Michonne and Carol as Rick says ‘we do what we need to to survive.” Michonne and Carol have both done things that were hard to get past, but this seems to be an acknowledgement of the necessity for those things. Not surprisingly, however, Daryl vehemently disagrees: “We ain’t them!” And Rick is afraid he’s been misunderstood. He leans forward to make eye contact with Daryl, “Hey. We’re not them. We’re not.” Rick’s meaning is that once they go back to the “real” world, they leave what they had to do behind them. Those things are dead to them. But all along Daryl has insisted that they aren’t dead yet. What they do matters. The fight matters. For Daryl, you don’t’ get a clean slate. The point is whether the ends justify the means.
Daryl walks away from the group to discover the herd of walkers converging on the flimsy barn doors. Daryl braces himself against the horde. He’s joined by Maggie and then Sasha, the three of them fending the dead off by themselves. They do it all silently so as not to incense the walkers. Rick is the first of the others to notice and then everyone comes to stand beside and behind the other three. It’s another beautiful shot that parallels the opening shot of the three walking down the road toward the living. It’s a wonderfully chaotic scene, but of course, the strength of the group prevails.
In the morning the storm has passed, and Maggie wakes up staring at Judith in Rick’s arms. It’s an affirmation of life in every way. The walkers forced the three to choose life, to choose to fight. Maggie goes to Daryl who is still keeping watch. Carl (Chandler Riggs) reaches out to Maggie by giving her a music box that he found while looking for water at the beginning of the episode, but it doesn’t work. Daryl has fixed it for her – “it had grit in the gear box.” Which is a bit of a metaphor for their lives! It’s important that Daryl gives Maggie back the music that Beth so loved and that is so important to the continuation of real society.
Maggie and Daryl watch Sasha sleep. Daryl says to her “He was tough” meaning Tyreese. Maggie agrees, and Daryl goes on, “So was she. She didn’t know it, but she was.” There’s obvious affection in his voice. And of course, he couldn’t know that she had discovered the toughness before she died.
Maggie wakes Sasha and takes her to watch the sunrise. It’s literally the dawn of a new day, the first day of the rest of their lives. As they walk through the devastation, Sasha says, “It should have torn us apart.” And Maggie says, “It didn’t.” The same could be said for the recent deaths and everything else that’s happened to them. Maggie is really the only other one in the group that Sasha was close to other than Bob and Tyreese. Sasha was brutal with Noah because she feels the same way he does. Sasha tells Maggie, “Noah, that kid, he said he didn’t know if he could make it. That’s how I feel.” Maggie tells her, You’re gonna make it. The both of us we will. That’s the hard part.” Cohan and Martin-Green are both outstanding in this scene. Having to live is much harder than simply giving up, not just because of how hard it is to live, but also because of having to live with the loss of those you love. Sasha is finally able to grieve. Maggie shows Sasha the music box, telling her that Daryl fixed it. But when she tries to get it to play it doesn’t.
And that’s the moment when Aaron (Ross Marquand) shows up. He identifies himself as a friend – and haven’t they heard that before! He also asks to talk to the person in charge – “Rick, right?” Sasha and Maggie are immediately suspicious. Maggie says, “How do you know?” Meaning how does he know who their leader is – clearly they’ve been under surveillance. Sasha asks, “Why?” Why do they want to talk to Rick – because they’ve been there with the Governor and Gareth, haven’t they?
Aaron tells them, “I have good news.” And the music box picks that moment to play. Is this then the light at the end of the darkness that they’ve been looking for? The episode ends with a simply beautiful shot of the music box in the foreground with Sasha and Maggie behind, holding their guns on Aaron, and the dawn in the background.
This was a richly intense episode. It brings back themes that have been running through the series since the beginning. It’s beautifully shot and acted. Even the title plays off of so many previous episodes, most clearly “Us” from last season, but also “Alone from last season and “Strangers” from this season. What did you think of the episode? Do you trust Aaron? Are they the walking dead? Can they simply walk away from what they do to survive? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below!
About the Author - Lisa Macklem
I do interviews and write articles for the site in addition to reviewing a number of shows, including Supernatural, Arrow, Agents of Shield, The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, Forever, Defiance, Bitten, Glee, and a few others! Highlights of this past year include covering San Diego Comic Con as press and a set visit to Bitten. When I'm not writing about television shows, I'm often writing about entertainment and media law in my capacity as a legal scholar. I also work in theatre when the opportunity arises. I'm an avid runner and rider, currently training in dressage.
