Gene Page/AMC Danai Gurira's Michonne on Sunday's episode of 'The Walking Dead.' Spoiler alert! Do not read this until you've watched Sunday night's midseason premiere of "The Walking Dead."
You've been warned.
Sunday night’s midseason return opens with a shot of freshly-turned earth, and a shovel tearing into it as one of our survivors digs a grave. We cut to Maggie sobbing by a small campfire on the side of the road, and Noah crying, and Father Gabriel giving a eulogy.
Naturally, we assume that we're watching Beth's funeral, since the teen was tragically killed in the final moments of the December midseason finale, just as she was finally reunited with the group for the first time since season four.
But then there's a flickering series of disjointed images that also cross the screen — including a shot of the prison, the railroad tracks to Terminus, a photograph of twin boys, baby Judith crying, a skeleton lying on the ground with wildflowers grotesquely growing through its rib cage, a chalk child's scrawling of a smiling sun, and finally, a framed picture of a peaceful little cabin with someone's blood slowly dripping down it. These images don't make any particular sense, and that don't really identify with Beth, as an ominous sign.
We also, oddly, see Lizzie and Micah saying, "It's better now."
So what's the story?
As the episode progresses, we find that the show-runners are screwing with time — and with the audience's emotions. This cold open includes the final thoughts flashing through the mind of a dying man.
THIS IS YOUR LAST WARNING: SPOILER LIES AHEAD!
And that man is Tyreese, played by Chad L. Coleman, who gives us an extensive look into his final moments on the show in Monday's Daily News.
The rest of the episode is an extended flashback of how this major, fan-favorite character gets killed, even as the group and the viewers are still reeling from the losses of Beth and Bob just a couple of episodes before.
Welcome to the back half of Season Five. Who needs a hug?
So a splinter group consisting of Rick, Noah, Michonne, Glenn and Tyreese are in a car zipping toward Noah's home in the suburbs of Richmond, Va. We learn via a walkie-talkie communication with Carol and the rest of the group that they've all been on the road for some time, traveled more than 500 miles, and hallelujah: THEY HAVE FINALLY LEFT THE STATE OF GEORGIA.
When Noah had left his walled-in community (shades of Woodbury) with his father a year or so before, it was still secure, and his mother and twin brothers were still there. He's confident the settlement will still be standing, but the others in the car aren't so sure. They've been on the road much, much longer than Noah has. Yet, Beth wanted to bring Noah home, so the group is taking him there to honor her final wishes.
Noah tries reassuring the scouting party that trying to trade Beth and Carol for Dawn's captured police officers was the right play, and Tyreese pipes up, "It went the way it had to, the way it was always going to" — words that will continue to haunt him during his final hours.
Tyreese also opens up to the group about how his father used to always make him and Sasha listen to the news on the radio, to teach them that it was their duty as citizens of the world to keep up with what was going on. The irony is, while he couldn't wrap his head around the horrors he would hear over the radio as a kid, he's dealing with things much, much worse now — from zombies to cannibals — since the world turned.
Rick parks the car in the woods, among an existing pile of wrecked cars, so that they can creep up to Noah's neighborhood on foot, just in case. Noah thinks they're being overly cautious, but Noah is still naive. He hasn't been to Woodbury or Terminus.
As they leave the car, Tyreese's eyes linger on a walker trapped in a car that is banging her hands pitifully upon the glass, and a skeleton with weeds and flowers growing through it on the grass — both images we saw in the episode's trippy opening montage. Here's where we start realizing that we're watching a flashback, and that the flashback is from Tyreese's perspective.
They come upon Shirewilt Estates, Noah's former home, but the community has fallen while Noah has been away. Houses are burnt down or partially damaged. The streets are empty, except for a few straggling walkers.
Noah is devastated, falls to the ground, and begins to sob (another scene we'd seen in the opening, along with the chalk sun drawn on the street beside him.)
While Michonne deals with her disappointment by decapitating a couple of walkers, Glenn proposes a sweep for supplies, and Tyreese decides to stay with Noah and comfort him.
We get some insight into Tyreese's near-suicidal behavior after Karen was killed in season four: including him jumping out of the car during the medicine run and throwing himself into a herd of walkers so that Daryl, Michonne and Bob could carry on.
"I wanted to die for what I lost, who I lost," he tells the grieving Noah. But he didn't die; in fact, his will to survive and to protect his family repeatedly got him out of situations that would have killed almost anyone else.
"And then later, I was there for Judith when she needed me. I saved her. I brought her back to her dad, and that wouldn't have happened if I had just given up, if I hadn't chosen to live," he says, putting his hand on Noah's shoulder. "This isn't the end."
Noah stands up (good job, Ty) but then he breaks into a shuffling run on his hurt ankle toward his old house (crap!) Tyreese hurries after him.
They get to the blue, ranch-style home, and Tyreese tries dissuading Noah from going inside, but the young man has to see what happened to his family for himself.
There's blood splattered on the walls, and the body of a middle-aged woman on the floor. Noah delicately covers his dead mother with a blanket, and starts whispering to her, "I tried to get back sooner. I tried..." (Thanks, Dawn. Death becomes you. Sure, her keeping Noah captive probably kept him alive, but he also wasn't able to protect his mother and brothers.)
Tyreese goes further into the house, giving Noah some privacy to mourn his mom. There's a shadow and the familiar moans of a zombie behind one closed door, which Ty ignores (mistake...) as he gets drawn into a boy's room, where model airplanes hang from the ceiling, a telescope peers out the window, and several pictures of Noah with a pair of younger, twin boys decorate the walls. The body of one of the twins lies dead on the bed.
Tyreese stares intently at one photo of the boys — the same photo the camera lingered on in the opening (Easter egg #412 this episode) — and while he is distracted by the glossy pic, the same twin he's staring at, but now zombified, rushes up behind him and sinks its teeth into his arm.
CRAP.
While Tyreese yells and fights him off, Noah appears and dispatches his little brother cleverly by spiking it in the head with one of the model airplanes. (It's almost the Zombie Kill of the Week.)
Noah limps off to get help, while Tyreese sinks to the floor, the blood pouring out of his arm. As his life bleeds out of him, the radio across the room starts crackling with static. A journalist begins dictating a series of disturbing reports of rebels terrorizing villagers in some remote country, "carrying out revenge attacks involving hacking inmates with machetes" as well as reports of cannibalism and setting people on fire.
Of course, these kinds of atrocities have all been either experienced or carried out by Tyreese and the survivors since the world turned.
We realize Tyreese is definitely hallucinating when we see Martin — the Terminus-turned-Hunter survivor that Ty was supposed to kill, but letting him live allowed him to later terrorize Rick's group and eat part of Bob's leg.
"I tried to tell you," the late Martin chuckles, recalling their past conversation when he warned Tyreese that he was too soft to survive in this world. "It was gonna be you. You're the kind of guy who saves babies."
Ghost Martin taunts Tyreese that it's all his fault that Bob is dead, which could have had some crazy domino effect in killing Beth, as well. But then Bob (also deceased), yet another piece of Tyreese's addled subconscious, also appears. Ghost Bob calls bull***t on that, and reminds Tyreese that he was bitten in the food bank, and was destined to die anyway.
"It went the way it had to, the way it was always going to," he says, echoing Tyreese's words from earlier.
And then the ethereal entourage reels in a real kingpin: The governor walks into the room, reminding Tyreese that he has to "earn his keep" — but as the governor lunges toward him, his face dissolves into that of the actual walker that really IS there, and which comes seriously close to tearing Tyreese apart.
This is one of the better, more claustrophobic fights to the death we've seen, and props to the extra playing the zombie: his lunges and his snapping jaws are terrifying.
But Tyreese fends him off by actually shoving his already-bitten arm into the monster's mouth (What the hell, right? It's a lost cause anyway.) and then bashing its head in with a rock he finds on the dead twins' shelf. Zombie Kill of the Week, for sure.
Tyreese crawls back under the desk, catching his breath, while the dead zombie begins bleeding onto the picture of the house we'd seen earlier, its blood pooling on the glass.
Let's cut back to the others for a moment. Rick, Glenn and Michonne have been scavenging what supplies they can from the empty homes, and deliberating about what's next, and how Beth's death has impacted them. While they recognize Dawn really hadn't intended to kill Beth, both Rick and Glenn admit to wanting to kill her in retaliation anyway, as well as the desire to keep moving forward without looking back.
But Michonne cuts in that they can be on the road for too long, and that it's time for them to settle down. She should know; remember the savage Michonne of old, who kept two deformed walkers as "pets"? The same woman who once used every excuse she could think of to leave the security of their prison settlement, galloping off on her horse to hunt down the governor, or going on supply runs, is now the woman convinced that it's time for the group to find other people and put down roots again.
She tries telling Rick and Glenn that they can fix the break in the fence here, and clear out the walkers, and make this community their new home.
Rick gently argues that it's not safe because, like the prison, this place is surrounded by forest, so there's no sight lines. Anyone could sneak up on them the way the governor did — or the way Carol crept up on Terminus.
Michonne dashes through the break in the wall, while telling the others they can clear out some of the trees — but she's stopped in her tracks, because she has stumbled across a killing field. There are hacked body parts strewn all over the place. I'm no expert, but this didn't look like zombie work to me. This looked like people cutting up other people, and littering the land with disembodied torsos, arms and legs, like a warning.
Glenn dully says it doesn't matter. Wherever they go, whatever they do, whoever killed Dawn in retaliation for Beth, it doesn't matter. He stares at the carnage, sounding completely disillusioned.
But Michonne hasn't given up hope yet. She suggests continuing onto Washington D.C., anyway. So what if Eugene was lying about a cure there? He dreamed up D.C. for a reason — because it makes sense that the nation's capital and seat of government would still likely be their best chance of finding help.
"It's a possibility. It's a chance," she argues. "Instead of just ... being out here. Instead of just making it." And here she gestures toward the scattered body parts. "Because right now, this is what 'making it' looks like.'"
Rick, surprisingly, is convinced. "We should go to Washington," he says. Michonne cracks a smile.
Of course, just as our heroes get a new sense of purpose for the season, all hell breaks loose. Walkers start coming at them from the woods, and, they hear Noah screaming for help back inside the villa. Zombies have pinned him down on a nearby porch, and Michonne swings her katana at one monster — and her sword stops in its tracks. Huh?
Turns out, there's a metal rod in the zombie's neck that blocked her blow. Now Michonne is in trouble, but Rick hacks it with his machete, and they're able to take down the other nearby walkers. Noah explains that Tyreese has been bitten, and they take off. But will they get there in time?
Tyreese is circling the drain. The room is positively crammed with the past characters he is hallucinating, including Beth (nice to see you again, Emily Kinney) strumming her guitar and crooning a folk ballad. Lizzie and Micah are sitting at her feet, repeatedly telling Tyreese, "It's OK now."
All of the ghosts are encouraging him to let go. Bob says, "It's OK that you didn't want to be a part of it anymore," as Beth echoes, "You don't have to be a part of it."
Martin and the governor, however, continue to taunt him about the way he lived his life, particularly for forgiving Carol after he found out that she killed Karen.
But that's the heart of who Tyreese is; he's always been a gentle giant more ready to love than to lay down his hammer on someone. He stands slowly to his feet, even has Noah had done outside earlier, and rails against his demons.
"I know who I am," he says in his final monologue on the show. "I know what happened, and what's going on ... and it's not over. I forgave [Carol] because it's not over ... I kept listening to the news, so I could do what I could do to help. I'm not giving up, you hear me? I'm not giving up. People like me — they CAN live. Ain't nobody gotta die today."
Alas.
Tyreese collapses to the floor again, and as he hallucinates the little girls taking his hand, suddenly he becomes lucid again, and we see it's Rick holding out his bitten arm as Michonne neatly slices it off with her sword, hoping (too late) to stave off the infection to the rest of his body.
The viewers are then treated to a beautiful, slow-motion sequence where the group fights off zombies as they try carrying Tyreese's limp body out of the estate.
Tyreese's life continues flashing before his eyes: Carol in the grove just after shooting Lizzie; Sasha killing Martin in Father Gabriel's church; Rick punching him back at the prison; Bob saying, "It went the way it had to, the way it was always going to."
Rick, Michonne, Glenn and Noah just manage to get Tyreese into the car, and radio back to camp that he's been bitten, and to get Sasha and Carl away from there.
Of course, as they're trying to drive away from the wreck, their car's tires get stuck in the mud, they accidentally slam into the van in front of them, and a bunch more walkers — with XXs carved into their foreheads, and many of them also missing limbs (??) — spill onto the trunk of the car. Rick speeds away, leaving the reanimated heads and torsos littered on the ground behind them. (What the hell was that?)
In the car, Tyreese imagines he hears the radio broadcasting all the troubles of the world again (many which parallel things we've seen on the show) including cannibalism, breaking down prisons, and the mutilation of children and young mothers in an endless war.
"Turn it off," Tyreese croaks, finally giving in. And as he looks around the car, instead of seeing Rick, Glenn, Michonne and Noah, he sees Beth driving, with Bob in the passenger seat, and the girls sitting beside him in the back seat.
Ty looks out the window at the sun dappling the leaves of passing trees, and the ghosts in the car all smile at him, and his field of vision slowly fades to black. He fought like hell, but it's time for him to move on.
The car stops, and Rick and the group pull Tyreese out into the road. Rick kneels beside him, and the others hang their heads. He's gone.
We come full circle to the burial we saw at the beginning of the episode, except this time we see Tyreese's face at peace as someone covers him with a sheet.
They are burying him beneath a willow tree as Father Gabriel says some comforting words, and members of the group each take turns with the shovel, spooning a clod of earth atop Tyreese's corpse.
Daryl passes the shovel to Sasha, who throws some dirt on her brother, listlessly drops the shovel, and stumbles away. Rick picks it up and gets back to work, furiously covering his friend.
A wooden cross made from sticks stands at the head of Tyreese's grave, and his knit cap is draped over the top of it.
Blackout.
LAST GASPS
- The showrunners honored Tyreese with a "24"-style tribute over the closing credits in lieu of theme music. But instead of a silent clock, we just heard Rick shoveling dirt on Tyreese's grave while cicadas buzzed lazily in the background. Very nice touch.
- So that's two major back-to-back deaths in two consecutive episodes; who do you think will be left by the end of the season?
- We're finally out of Georgia, and heading to D.C. — where Morgan is also supposed to be heading, after finding Rick's map. What are the chances of Morgan meeting up with the group by the end of the season? And if the past couple of communities (Woodbury, Terminus, Grady Hospital) have housed some horrible people, who's to say that D.C.'s survivors will be any better?
- I'm troubled by what happened in Noah's neighborhood, particularly the mutilated limbs just beyond the walls, and the graffiti inside reading "Wolves Not Far." Is this a roving band of outlaws, similar to the gang that nearly "claimed" Daryl, Rick, Michonne and Carl last season, that we'll have to watch out for?
- Beyond the many Easter eggs (mostly Tyreese's flashbacks) sprinkled throughout the episode, did anyone else notice the "Dead End" sign on the door of the room where Tyreese suffered his fatal bite? That gave me a sad laugh. Also ... there was a lingering shot of Glenn holding a baseball bat, which readers of the graphic novels know may or may not be some major foreshadowing for that character. It certainly gave me a chill.
- On a lighter note, I cracked up when Michonne smashed a sports collector's framed baseball T-shirt, picked up it, and shrugged. "Clean shirt," she says. You tell 'em, Michonne.
- And when the group was struggling to get Tyreese's limp body through the razor wire fence, did anyone else think that the walker who came after them looked a lot like Stan Lee?
R.I.P. Tyreese. You were one of the good ones.