The Walking Dead S4 Ep14 – The Grove

In this episode we are asked some hard questions, to which there may or may not be any right answers. OH THE EMOTIONAL CONFLICT!

Recap!

In the cold open, slow, old-timey music plays as a kettle begins to boil on the stove. As the camera pans away, we see through the window two running figures in the yard. The kettle starts to whistle, getting louder and higher-pitched, and the music continues playing. It’s all just a big party full of fun-times until you realize one of the figures is running and playing, and the other is a walker, and nope, nope, nope. Nuh-uh. No. Good times are over. Bad. Very bad times ahead.

After the opening credits, we find Carol, Tyreese, and the girls spending the night under the stars and on the train tracks, still on their way to Terminus. Carol and Lizzie are keeping watch, and Lizzie tells Carol – oh so nonchalantly – about how she shot two people during the fall of the Prison to protect Tyreese. Carol assures Lizzie that she had to shoot them, and tells her about Sophia – how she didn’t have a mean bone in her body, and how that led to her death. She promises Lizzie that that won’t happen to her.

The next morning, Tyreese and Carol discuss the two sisters as Carol treats a cut on Tyreese’s arm. Carol is worried that Lizzie still seems to think walkers are not inherently dangerous to humans, ‘just different’, and says Mika ‘doesn’t have a mean bone in her body’, which is worse, and also definitely not ominous at all.

They continue down the tracks, noticing the smell of smoke in the woods, likely the fire from Daryl and Beth burning the moonshine house in “Still.” Carol takes Mika to find water, and Tyreese stays with Lizzie and Judith. He is about to dispatch a disabled walker on the train tracks, but Lizzie begs him not to and he (against all rational thought) acquiesces.

Perfect little angels…

Meanwhile, Carol talks to Mika as they search for water, hoping to toughen her up, but Mika is stubbornly kind, hopeful, and sweet. She shows remarkable compassion, even towards people who may want to hurt her, convinced that ‘they probably weren’t like that before’.

She and Carol find a cabin extremely good shape, with an abundant supply of pecans from the tree in the yard and a clean well. The group decides to stay a while, to catch their breath before making the last push to Terminus. Tyreese and Carol clear out the house, while the girls stay outside. They get into an argument, and their voices draw a walker out from a side door. It gets uncomfortably close before Mika is able to kill it.

Even though she looked convincingly scared of the walker less than two seconds ago, Lizzie is even more upset by the walker’s death. Mika apologizes for yelling at her and tells her to look at the flowers in the garden to calm herself down, like she’s supposed to. That night, the group sits by the fireplace, more comfortable, safe, full, and warm than they have been in a long time, which can only mean terrible-awful things are about to go down, because in this show, happiness must be punished severely.

In the morning, Carol puts the kettle from the opening on the stove to boil, and then spots Lizzie ‘playing’ with the walker in the yard. She quickly runs outside and kills the walker, despite Lizzie’s desperate protests. Lizzie screams at Carol hysterically, calling the walker her ‘friend’, and crying by the walker’s side.

“YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND!”

Later, Lizzie sneaks away from the house with a mouse in a box, to feed to the walker Tyreese left on the train tracks. Mika follows her, trying again to convince her that the walkers are dangerous, but Lizzie tells her that the walkers just want her to ‘change’, and wonders if she should, slowly moving her hand closer to the walker’s mouth. A group of burnt and crispy walkers bursts from the woods nearby, and chase the two girls back towards the house. Carol and Tyreese come running when they hear their screams, and Lizzie shoots at the walkers, but it’s not clear whether or not she actually hits any.

Night falls again with the ‘family’ sitting by the fireplace and Lizzie admits to Carol that she knows what she has to do now. Mika says she doesn’t want to be mean, and Lizzie says she has to be, sometimes. They help Carol make candied pecans as Tyreese naps in the armchair by the fire. What an adorable, dysfunctional, dangerous family they are!