First things first:  I owe a GINORMOUS apology to anyone who came to Off-Color TV last week without having watched The Walking Dead yet.  Like the clueless git that I am, I led off my recap with a photo that was a big ole spoiler to anyone who hadn’t watched the episode yet.  So, if anyone was inadvertently spoiled before the much smarter admins caught my gaff, you have my most sincere and humble apologies.

So, moving on:  Season 2, in the books.  And some really cool set-up for Season 3!  But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

We pick up more or less where we left off, but instead of being wise to the humongous horde of zombies heading straight for their tasty brains (which, let’s face it:  these zombies are gonna be going away hungry.  There are not enough brains on that entire farm to satisfy one walker, let alone 3,254,692 of them.  I’m just sayin’…), Rick and Carl are taking a leisurely stroll back toward the house while Rick tries to come up with a reasonable explanation for why Shane was all of a sudden zombie-Shane.  Luckily, Rick is saved from having to answer awkward questions by the sudden realization that there ARE in fact 3,254,692 zombies bearing down just a few yards away from them.

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Wow, you guys!!  I was SO ready to come here this morning and write the most ragetastic ragecap that ever raged, but then?  THEN, the last five minutes of the episode happened, and the sun came out, and birds started singing in 6-part harmony, and unicorns pranced through fields of gold and Puff the Magic Dragon frolicked in the autumn leaves in a land called Honnalee!  The people rejoiced, there was happy-dancing in the streets…

Oh, whoops.  Did I type that out loud?

*ahem*

Okay, you know how last week’s episode had a lot of action, and zombies, and they didn’t clutter up the screen with a bunch of superfluous characters? Well, this week wasn’t like that.  ALL of the fucking annoying and superfluous people crawled out of the woodwork this week.

We open on The Man beating the shit out of Randall in an effort to elicit information about the gang he was running with.  According to Randall, who may or may not be telling the truth, there are about 30 in the group, including men, women and children.  He says they have heavy artillery, and that they travel around scavenging.  He goes on to say that some guys found a campsite with a father and two teenage daughters, and that the other two guys raped the girls, but offers by way of a character reference his non-participation in the gang rape that he clearly at least watched.  Nice.

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Up is down, down is up, the world has gone topsy-turvy and I think the earth may have reversed its polarity:  I would now actually shoot/punch/kick-in-the-face Lori before I would NLR.  What the hell has the world come to?

There was a lot to like about this episode.  And by “a lot,” I mean the complete absence of Hershel, Dale, Carl, Carol, and the black dude whose name I can’t even remember anymore because they’ve made his character so freaking pointless in it.  Not so awesome:  the complete absence of Glenn and The Man.  Come back, Glenn and The Man!  In lieu of the awesome and the opposite-of-awesome characters, what we did get was a SHIT TON of zombies on our zombie show, along with all of the creative deaths we’ve come to expect from this show.  To borrow a phrase from a certain gay, Internet dragon in the Television Without Pity ”Supernatural” recaps, GOOOOOOOOOORRRRRRRRRRRREEEEEEE!

So, what happened:  Rick and Shane take a road trip to deposit fence-impaled-guy someplace where he won’t be able to find his way back to  a) his gang of outlaw types, and b) the farm.  They have him stuffed kind of hilariously into the trunk/back of the SUV, and they’ve tied his hands and his feet with rope, blindfolded him, duct-taped his mouth, and stuffed blaring iPod earphones into his ears.  Guys, I appreciate the effort, but he’s not a homing pigeon, and you’re not in a Bond film.  I think you can probably find some woods, turn him around a few times to get him dizzy, and call it a day.

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So, hey!  Something strange happened:  I didn’t actually hate this episode!  Well, except for the part where Lori neither died in the car crash nor got munched on by a zombie, obvs.  But I totally didn’t want to punch NLR in the face, so that’s something, right? And we finally have a situation set in motion that should force the gang off of the Not-So-Idyllic Farm of Plot Stagnation, so I’m handing out a solid “B” on the episode.  Also, I learned something interesting from Talking Dead last night that I didn’t know before:  The series title “Walking Dead” refers not to the zombies, but to the survivors, which casts a much darker pall over the series.  Because, you know, a worldwide zombie apocalypse wasn’t already dark to begin with.

Hey, speaking of dark:  Somehow, between the end of the last episode (when it was full daylight) and the beginning of this episode, night totally fell like an anvil whenever Wile E. Coyote is around.  What the hell were Rick, Hershel and Glenn doing in that bar all this time?  Not checking pockets for weapons and bullets and other useful items apparently, because they wait until they’re back on camera to do that.  Famewhores!  Kinda like how the Jersey Shore denizens only act high and slutty and obnoxious when there’s a camera on them… oh, wait.  Nevermind.

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Hey, welcome back, y’all!  I’d like to say that the hiatus was a living hell and beat my breast and pull my hair out and all that stuff, like I do when The Vampire Diaries decides to take a week off to let you catch your fucking breath, but frankly my reaction to The Walking Dead being on hiatus was more of an “eh, whatever.”  Oh hell, what am I saying, it was totally a “Woo-hoo!!  No recaps for several weeks!”  Not that I don’t like recapping for ya, guys; it’s just that I can only spew so much vitriol at once, and between Dale, Lori and NLR, theyreally take it out of me, you know?

We pick up right where we left off — in the aftermath of the Great Zombie Cleanse of 2011.  Herschel is all butt-hurt that the group (mostly Shane) have killed off his barnful o’ walkers, while Shane and some of the others are all accusatory that they knew Sophia was in there all along but let them go out and risk themselves looking anyway.  Herschel, as you might expect, orders them off of his land.  Maggie takes the opportunity to smack Shane in the face, which… valid.  I mean, however she may have been changing her mind about the walker situation, to have someone who is a guest just come in and take it upon himself to “clean up Herschel’s mess” is a little off-putting, you know?

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Mid-season hiatus!!  Woo-hoo!!!  Monday mornings where I don’t have to pretend to be working while I really write a recap!!  No more frantically scribbling notes and pissing my husband off by pausing all the time in the middle of scenes.  I can kick back, and…  what?  I still have to recap the mid-season finale?

crap  Okay, then!  Glenn and Dale inform the rest of their group about the walkers in the barn.  The group is understandably a tad dismayed about this development.  Shane, who has been looking for any excuse, takes that as evidence that they should be moving on, perhaps to the army base they were originally headed for.  Rick and Shane have argument number 3,256 about whether they are safer on the farm or on the road, and Rick drops a dime to Shane that Lori is pregnant.  Carol argues that her daughter is still out there somewhere, but Shane is Over It and doesn’t want to hear that noise.  The Man argues that he found Sophia’s doll just a few days prior, which I have to admit is sort of an anti-argument for Sophia being alive and well and living on sardines somewhere.  Shane and The Man almost come to blows before being forcibly separated.  (Daryl is scrappy, but my money’s on Shane in a fist fight.)

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Jeez, what is it with these people trying to do my job for me?  Last week, Chris Hardwick was picking on his own clothes instead of letting me do it, and this week here’s Glenn recapping the episode while he’s IN the episode.  Guys, y’all need to step off.  Please.  Leave the mocking and the recapping to the professionals.

Encroachment onto recapper territory notwithstanding, Glenn is nevertheless accurate, because “there’s walkers in the barn” and “Lori’s pregnant” pretty much sum up the episode.  Oh, and plus, THIS happens:

But we’ll get to that later.

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Yeah, so this recap is about 24 hours late, but hey, better late than never, right?  I could tell you all about my truly craptastic weekend showing dogs, but then I’d just be babbling about majors and Best Opposites and Selects and ring procedure and your eyes would start to glaze over just like my husband’s do, so how about we just get right to the zombies and the batshit crazy veterinarian farm owners (Spoiler!)?

The episode opens on a flashback, and can I just say how much I love when they do this?  I mean, for dramatic purposes it was way cool in the pilot to have Rick get his ass shot and then wake up into a full-blown zombie apocalypse, but I personally love seeing the progression as the world goes to shit.  Like, I have questions, you know?  So it’s nice that we’re getting some of that in flashbacks.  Even if those flashbacks do involve a bunch of annoying people.

The scene takes place at night, in the middle of a massive traffic jam.  Shane is trying to find a radio station that is still broadcasting, but he finds only static.  Lori and Carl have gotten out of the car to walk around, and they meet Carol and Sophia for the first time.  The audience also meets Carol’s asshole husband (whose name I can’t be bothered to go look up) when he starts bitching at Carol about telling people that they have MREs and so forth.  He couches his bitching in military terms about how they need to keep the operation on the down-low, so it seems he was one of those ex-military assholes, as opposed to a regular garden-variety asshole, and those are always the worst.

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We open on an idyllic farm scene:  An old tractor, come to rest in a field; cows grazing in the pasture; a huge old-timey barn.  Lest you’re tempted for two seconds to think that life doesn’t suck, we soon see the gang building a stone mound to honor Otis.  Although there is no body to bury (being as how Shane left him at the high school like a hostess gift for the zombie Thanksgiving), they are nevertheless memorializing him with a pile of rocks and a lame-ass service, during which they ask Shane to “speak for Otis” since he was the last to see him alive and all.  Awkward.

That social nicety attended to, Maggie shows Rick a topographical map of the county, allowing him to exposit that this is Day 3 of Sophie being lost.  Jesus, seriously?  It feels like she’s been lost and Carol has been crying uselessly since roughly the Middle Ages.  Doc points out that neither Rick nor Shane are in any condition to go out and search, what with Shane having a bum ankle and Rick being all drained of blood and such.  Probably as sick of most of these people as I am, The Man offers to head to the creek by himself to do some searching.  Rick asks if The Man is okay on his own, and tells him the finding of the farm, getting the map etc. kind of lets him off the hook if doesn’t want to continue to burdened by their sorry asses.  In typical fashion, The Man just sort of shrugs that off, telling Rick his “other plans fell through.”  Hee.

Maggie will make a run into town to see if there are any antibiotics left at the pharmacy.  Rick volunteers Glenn to accompany her, saying he’s their “go to town” guy.  It’s… nice to have a purpose, I guess.

Shane says he’ll drive out on the interstate to have a nervous breakdown wait and see if Sophia shows up.  There’s also some business about Hershel not wanting this to be an armed camp and maybe the weapons should be locked up.  Gee, it’s like he doesn’t trust them not to shoot him and his family in their beds or something.  Rick negotiates one armed guard “to make everyone feel safer,” and Doc reluctantly agrees.  NLR hasn’t had her weekly bitch session yet, so she pitches a hissy over having to give up her gun again.  Shane shuts her up by giving her another lesson in disassembling and reassembling the weapon, rather than just shooting her in the face like I would probably have done at this point, because I apparently have more anger management issues than Shane, and if that’s not scary as fuck, I don’t know what the hell is.

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