The Walking Dead, Season 5, Episode 13: Forget
Holy shit, Carol's speech to that little kid about what she's going to do to him if he tattles is absolutely terrifying. All the kid wants is a cookie! And Carol's civilian clothes just makes her a lot more unsettling. She doesn't have any particularly scary inflections, she doesn't do a growl, she doesn't shout or scream. She just says it in a way a mother might be scolding a child, but the threat of leaving him tied up for the monsters to come and eat him while he screams and screams leaves such a lasting image to me, and I'm not the little kid being threatened by her.
So yeah, it's another slow episode as Team Rick settles into Alexandria, with Rick, Daryl and Carol considering a takeover should the place not suit them. They're playing the villain part now, but they're still our heroes, and honestly both Daryl and Rick really seems to have taken a shine to the people in the place, enough to at least give it a chance. Still, it's amazingly twisted to have Team Rick arrive, expecting something sinister and evil, when Carol, and to a lesser extent Rick and Daryl, are the snakes in the garden right now. And while it might be a questionable decision to make our heroes "evil" in a sense, it's a very interesting take on them at this moment.
And, well, not everyone is very happy about this new community, and really none of them realize how lucky they are to have never fought and killed zombies, let alone other humans. It makes Aaron's naivete (sure, let the bunch of strangers bring you to their base) a couple episodes ago understandable. And he's easily the most experienced out of the Alexandrians! The episode focuses primarily on the coup d'etat trio, but some other characters get a bit of spotlight here and there. Abraham tries to give it a shot, if only for the beer. Michonne hangs her katana on the wall in a powerful moment. Noah is awkward and Glenn and Maggie try to get him to socialize. Sasha? Sasha isn't having any of this bullshit, and she's the secondary character that gets the most screentime. Everyone's just chattering like there's no zombie apocalypse raging outside their walls. And yes, in a sense I get Diana's need to move on if they're going to build a community, but on the other hand, maybe it's anger at their weakness, anger at the unfairness of the world, anger that they lost Tyreese and Bob a couple of days before they came to this heaven, but when their worries are nonsense like cookie recipes, hang-outs and favourite foodstuff, Sasha just... snaps. When the nice people of Alexandria are telling her about how it'd be so nice to have a boar leg to make some fancy-ass dish, Sasha's probably having flashback about how her boyfriend got his leg eaten by psychotic cannibals shortly before he dies.
And can you blame her? The only reason she attended that party is only so she can get to become a lookout (and what a stupid thing to do, not to have lookouts). It's very understandable and nice for Diana to want to involve Sasha in stuff like this, but not everyone is a socializer -- especially with strangers.
Carol, meanwhile, is eating it all up. She's just amazing. She notes to Rick and Daryl how amazing it is to be 'invisible', how she just eats up inconsequential gossip like chocolate and cookies and laughing it up with all the women, stuff that people do if there isn't a zombie apocalypse. Where most of her group is having trouble fitting in she's doing an amazing job of putting this mask taht everything is okay, something that gets an extra shade darker when you realize that as someone married to an abusive shit like Ed, she definitely has a lot of practice lying to people and pretending everything's smiles.
Rick, meanwhile, has been taken a bit into the possible heaven that's Alexandria, even if his proposal for a manned turret is shot down. Yes, he's still paranoid enough to stash some guns elsewhere just in case, but by the end of the episode he and Daryl decide to see how this plays out and Carol agrees. There's an odd subplot where he kisses the pretty barber lady from last episode (Jessie?) and he gets defensive when he sees Jessie with her apparent jackass of a husband, even reaching for his gun instinctively. I don't think the show'll go that far with Rick, but seeing him basically, well, pull a Shane? That's pretty cold.
Daryl's subplot this episode's probably the least interesting. He's out skulking in the woods, and bonds with Aaron and they kind of fail to save Buttons the horse. Daryl decides not to go to the party anyway, but Aaron and Eric invite him for spaghetti, and then Aaron makes Daryl the offer to be a fellow recruiter because he doesn't want to risk Eric's life. Also in addition to the perk that Daryl doesn't have to socialize in inane parties, Daryl gets a badass chopper bike again, which is win-win for Daryl.
There are signs of mystery afoot, of course, beyond the coup trio. There's the mystery of Enid and where she snuck off to last episode. There's the missing gun that Rick leaves behind in the rubble where he holds meetings, which I forgot to mention last episode. There's the 'W' brand that Daryl finds on the forehead of a dead walker. There's whoever slaughtered the people in Noah's town.
Overall, it's a pretty strong episode, which I don't think I would be saying about an episode that's just mostly people settling in a community.
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