The Walking Dead S04E14 Review: Lizzie's Crazy

The Walking Dead, Season 4, Episode 14: The Grove

Okay, to be fair, there are some really powerful moments here. Standout moments include the confrontations between Tyreese and Carol -- especially the relatively quick and succinct confession and resolution of their conflict, as well as Carol taking a gun and shooting Lizzie. For that part of the episode I really want to give it praise. Carol really doesn't have to confess her sins to Tyreese. Sure, there was some unintentional guilt-tripping involved when Tyreese keeps telling Carol how he trusts her, how he misses Karen and sees her all the time, and the continued nightmares that Tyreese has throughout this episode is a very nice bit. Carol could've just buried the secret forever -- as far as she's aware of only Rick knows this bit, and all she'll have to wrestle with is her own conscience. She could've blamed it on the many, many now-dead residents of their settlement, or even on the Governor since they actually have a villain... but seeing one of her adoptive daughters die, and having to execute the other has absolutely broken her down.

Yes, she can deal with coldly killing Karen and... and Woodbury Redshirt #25, whoever his name is, but these two kids are ones she love, ones that essentially took over the place of her 'weak' daughter. And yet not even that is enough to help them survive in this world. The confrontation between her and Tyreese, with the gun in front of the man, is an exquisite piece of drama that I felt would not have the punch it did if I hadn't spent the last forty minutes watching these characters interact and try to be surrogate parental figures to Lizzie and Mika. Which, of course, falls into the same problem that the Daryl/Beth episode a while back has... very, very slow pacing for a big oomphy climax at the end. The thing is, the climax is definitely something the show's been building up to the whole season... but the earlier parts of the episode is just so much more boring and irritating than Daryl and Beth.

We also get the revelation that the complete idiot that's been feeding rats to the zombies and causing a huge chunk of the problems with them swarming the fences for the first part of the season is Lizzie. Well, that's an underwhelming, if sensible, answer.

And honestly, how the utter fuck did this stupid kid even survive this long? She clearly knows to run away from the zombies, she even offers to get her hand bitten by the limbless walker near the train tracks at one point, why the fuck is she still alive if she thinks zombification is an okay thing? Why the hell did she kill Mika and not herself?

Lizzie's really the big weak point of the episode, though I do have to concede the fact that I disliked Lizzie from the get-go and barely paid attention to her and Mika throughout the past 13 episodes. Sure, the scene where Carol has to shoot Lizzie was hard to watch and very heart-rending. The scene where Tyreese and Carol return to see Lizzie's hand soaked with blood and she's grinning over Mika's dead body... with baby Judith like within knife-reach... that was creepy as fuck.

But the rest of the episode she just sounds like a complete moron, even for a kid. Insisting that everything's going to work out, feeding rats to walkers, straight-up playing with one... it was creepy earlier in the season when you'd be forgiven for thinking that Lizzie is ultra super-duper naive for staying in the safety of Woodbury and later the prison, but at this point in time? She just feels stupid and you just know she's going to cause the death of one of the others because of her stupidity -- though the fact that she straight-up murders her little sister is, admittedly, a surprise for me. 

Mika herself is your average sweet, sensible kid, who understands that walkers are evil (they're fucking walking corpses of death, man) but doesn't have the heart to shoot people or even a deer. She tries her best to talk to Lizzie, and so does Carol, but honestly I'm a little pissed someone doesn't whack her in the head and scream louder at her to grow a brain cell or two. Maybe the show could've dialed her naivety back a little. I'm honestly not super sure how to accomplish that, but really, I'm just baffled how the fuck she managed to survive this long at all.

Thankfully Lizzie got killed -- and that scene was amazingly done, which is credits to the episode. I don't think the episode would've given me the emotional gut-punch if Lizzie had been bitten by the walkers or killed herself, because, shit, I think I would've pointed at her and laughed. I know, I'm a horrible person, but so's Lizzie. How this plays out gives me a huge chunk of tragedy and grief for Carol's sake. Also, the fact that it's children that's being killed makes it a fair bit harder to watch, as much as I find Lizzie irritating.

So yeah, while it's not a perfect episode (though a perfect example of how to guilt-trip the audience into feeling a particular emotion -- not that it's necessarily a bad storytelling trope) it still manages to deliver the conclusion to the Tyreese/Carol conflict that's been brewing, tell an interesting story with the unique concept of Lizzie (a.k.a. super-idiot-naive child) and having a pretty great execution scene.