The Walking Dead: “Am I the only one zen around here?”

Well, this was certainly a character-heavy, plot-lite episode.  We open on a flashback to the glorious days of yore, when Lori’s biggest problem was Rick being all calm and reasonable instead of… I don’t know, yelling at her and telling her she’s a bitchy cunt, I guess?  Wow, that Rick.  What a bastard.  Lori is waiting outside Carl’s school for him and bitching to another mom about said lack of spousal abuse, and getting about as much sympathy as you might expect, when Shane and another sheriff’s car pull up outside the school.  Shane doesn’t have to tell Lori what has happened; she just asks if Rick is alive.  Shane tells her he’s in surgery.  Lori goes over to tell Carl.

In the present, Rick is running through a field, carrying Carl.  Shane and the hunter who accidentally shot Carl are following.  The hunter is directing them to wherever he is hunkered down so the boy can get help.  Being older, and somewhat rotund, the hunter sends them ahead and tells Rick to tell Herchel that Otis sent him.  Otis, incidentally, is being played by Pruitt Taylor Vince, that creepy dude who was in that one horrible movie that I had to buy and watch because Daniel Gillies was in it.  I’m not sure I’m ready to forgive him for that whole debacle.

The rest of the pack is still in the woods, searching for Sophia as they head back toward the highway.  Lori heard the gunshot and wants to go back, but the group talks her out of it.  NLR and Carol take a moment to bond over missing daughters and dead sisters and whatnot, deciding they just have to keep hoping and praying.  Daryl (The Man) tells them to knock it off with all the hoping and praying, just know that they’re going to get Sophia back and she’s going to be fine, and says, “Am I the only one zen around here? Good lord.”  Okay, you know what?  Daryl IS The fucking Man, and I don’t think he deserves to be a parenthetical.  From now on, Daryl will henceforth be referred to as simply The Man, period.  Because he is.

Up on the highway, Dale is tinkering with shit and harvesting spare car parts while T-Dog wanders around aimlessly.  This time, though, T-Dog is wandering aimlessly because he’s brewing a nasty-ass infection in that arm, not just because that’s his usual modus operandi.  Dale decides they should maybe leave off the car parts and start searching those abandoned vehicles for something useful, like drugs.  I think I may go search the kitchen cupboards for something useful, like alcohol.

Have you ever wondered what happens to the ghosts of vampires who get bitten by werewolves and die of werewolf-rabies?  (You haven’t?  Weirdo.)  They end up playing farmer’s daughters in post-zombie-apocalyptic shows.  Maggie Green (played by Lauren Cohan, lately of The Vampire Diaries) spots Rick and Carl and calls out to her father, who leads Rick into one of the bedrooms of this lovely old farmhouse.  He appears to be a doctor of some sort, and tells Rick to give him some space so he can examine Carl.  Rick and Shane exit the room so Rick can begin his epic guilt trip until the doc calls Rick in to give blood for a transfusion, since he and Carl are both conveniently A-positive.

(Was anyone else waiting for there to be some dramatic reaction here, like maybe Carl wasn’t A-positive like Rick, leading to some revelation that Carl wasn’t his?  Just me?  Okay then.  Moving on…)

The doc explains that the bullet broke up when it entered Carl’s body, saying that there are 6 fragments.  Apparently he has x-ray vision or something that tells him this?  I guess?  Dr. X-ray says that there are signs of internal bleeding, and he’ll need to open Carl up to take them out, but to do that he needs to anesthetize him, and to do that he needs a reason to send people out to get trapped by zombies respirator.  Since Rick needs to stay there as a walking blood bag, Shane and Otis will go to the high school, which was a FEMA shelter until it got overrun by walkers.  They only have one rifle and Rick’s pistol between them for weapons.  I’m sure that fact won’t come in to play at all.

Dale and T-Dog have found nothing but ibuprofen (lame) and guts all over a child’s car seat.  T-Dog thinks they should just take off and leave before the group decides to… throw them a Donner party and eat them, because they’re the weakest… or something?  I don’t know, T-Dog be trippin’, yo, because of the raging fever from his blood infection.

The group almost makes it back to the highway without incident, but NLR (fucking of course) gets attacked by a walker.  Bet she wishes she’d kept the pistol when Lori offered it to her.  It’s looking pretty grim for NLR, until Maggie gallops up on a horse and gives the zombie a Louisville Slugger upside the head.  She tells Lori that Rick sent her, Carl’s been shot, drops her address for the others, and whisks Lori away on the horse with her.  (It’s nice that Rose’s ghost got to keep her horses, anyway.)

The others reach the highway and update Dale and T-Dog.  Carol doesn’t want to leave and go to the farmhouse in case Sophia makes it back to the highway, so The Man offers to stay there overnight in the RV and rig up a big sign  for Sophia.  Dale says he’ll stay too then, and NLR pipes in that she’s staying, because who’s going to around to make Dale feel bad about not letting her off herself if she’s not around?  Dale tells Glenn to take the jeep and take Carol and T-Dog to the farmhouse, because T-Dog is badly in need of drugs and there are none to be had there.  Hearing this, The Man rips a panel off of his motorcycle and takes out a big bag o’ pharmaceuticals, including some good antibiotics, not the generics.  Seems ole Merle had himself quite a stash to support his habits and livelihood.

Lori makes it to the farmhouse in time to question Dr. X-ray’s credentials to be cutting open her son.  It turns out that Dr. X-ray is actually a veterinarian, but as Rick points out, they’re not exactly in a position to shop for surgeons at the moment.  She’s also in time to talk Rick out of going to the school himself to see what’s taking Shane and Otis so long.

And what is taking them so long?  The roughly 150 walkers crawling all over the schoolyard, that’s what.  Shane creeps over to an abandoned sheriff’s cruiser and grabs a shotgun and some flares, and they fire off the flares to distract the walkers so they can make it into the FEMA trailer and harvest supplies.  Unfortunately, “ooh, shiny!” only distracts the walkers (one of whom I could SWEAR was Kevin Pereira from Attack of the Show) for so long, and when they go to exit the trailer, the walkers are all over them.  Shane and Otis fight their way to a set of doors on the school, and Shane uses the shotgun to take out the door’s window so they can go in.  They pull the metal cage across to keep the zombies out, but as the episode draws to a close, they’re looking, shall we say, pretty fucked.

What did you think of the episode?  Do you agree it felt more like set-up and character-development than anything else?  Did you think the blood-type thing was going to come back into play?  Could you swear that that one zombie was Kevin Pereira?  Sound off in the comments!