The Walking Dead S04E12 Review: Drinking Game

The Walking Dead, Season 4, Episode 12: Still

It's another bottle episode, focusing on Beth and Daryl's little misadventures without any stopping elsewhere, and for a moment I thought I was going to rant about what an annoying little shit Beth is, and how Daryl's gone from the interesting badass to an emo angry douche. But turns out that while the first... oh, twenty to twenty-five minutes of the episode is just following them doing generic survival things, creepy shit (how creepy are those zombies still hanging from their nooses?), Daryl rescuing Beth from stuff, playing 'have you or haven't you' games and talking about 'oh no we should survive' and stuff like that it turns out that they're both dealing with grief in their own way, and the confrontation with Daryl making such a huge ruckus and kind of forcing Beth to learn crossbowing is very raw and emotional. Helps that the rest of the episode ends up building up to the fact that the house they're shacking in is actually Daryl's old house. 

So Beth is just trying to keep up hope and distract herself from so much of the pain and death that had happened, trying to believe that they should be good people because what's the point of suffering and all that if they haven't? Meanwhile, Daryl feels responsible. If he had been stronger, if he had hunted down the Governor more aggressively, if he had shot the Governor before he hacked Hershel's head off... stuff like that. But at the same time, Beth is far more willing to let go of the past and just move on, because she knows there's no sense to wallow in the past, whereas Daryl is trapped in so much horrors both recent and past. What I get from his story is that the zombie apocalypse turned Daryl from a junkie without a purpose (who nearly got himself killed over an argument about a cartoon at one point) into one of the most badass members of their little group... only to absolutely fail at actually doing his job at being the badass guardian. 

It's probably a bit too slow of an episode for my liking, but the contrast between Beth's forced optimism and Daryl's cynical self-loathing is very well-done, and the two of them play off each other well. I'm not sure if the show's trying for the shipping route or not, but that final scene with them burning down Daryl's asshat father's house and flipping it off is pretty awesome. At the end of the episode both characters have grown somewhat, in a way that doesn't feel really unnatural. Beth grew somewhat stronger as being around Daryl has caused her to become more independent, while Daryl gets through his emo phase. 

So yeah, an episode that starts out very weak, but ends up actually making use of the weaker first half to make the last ten to fifteen minutes of the episode an absolute delight of character development. A filler episode that actually felt like one of the stronger entries in this season, which is not a thing I can say often about the Walking Dead.