There is something rotten in the state of Alexandria. “Start to Finish,” tonight’s mid-season finale of “The Walking Dead,” puts the hardy Grimes clan and the cloistered Alexandrians at the mercy of a massive horde of the undead, who come streaming through a collapsed section of wall like a teeming, flesh-rotted, stinking river.
The attack from the Wolves weakened the church tower that stood just outside the walls. At the end of last week’s episode, it collapsed, taking down with it one whole section of the wall that protects Alexandria. The town is quickly overrun by the dead, and the living scatter to wherever they can find shelter. If all that wasn’t enough, if you watched through the first segment of “Into the Badlands,” you saw a clip from somewhere down the road, with Daryl, Sasha and Abraham coming face to face with a band of men working for somebody called…Negan.
The immediate threat, however, is about as bad a situation as they could face, and there are several gasp-worthy moments. Moreover, there is no resolution, or even a cliffhanger so much as there is just a chapter ending. The episode ends with the walkers in control of the town, clogging the sidewalks and roads and making Alexandria look like a Harper Valley of the Damned. Deanna’s dream never seemed so unattainable, and not just for the fact that Rep. Monroe herself is no longer among the living.
There are far more walkers than this small band of survivors can handle. It’s amazing they lasted outside as long as they did. Rick tells everyone to scatter, and fires off a few rounds from that Colt Python. Deanna comes to his aid, and the two run for cover. Deanna is overrun, and Rick comes to her aid. A walker falls on her, and she falls into a construction table, landing on a table saw and getting a nice gash in her side.
We thought for sure that Ron was going to put a bullet through Carl’s eye, but when the wall collapses, Ron’s revenge fantasy is scattered with it. They’re all just running for cover now. Rick, Carl, Ron, Michonne, Deanna, and Fr. Gabriel form a clutch, running through the maze of walkers. They turn a corner, only to run into another horde. Jessie shows up on her porch, and fires off enough rounds to clear a path. They all scramble inside.
Meanwhile, Eugene is so scared witless, he can’t even move. He’s standing there, up against a wall, as the walkers amble by him. On the ground in front of him is somebody’s walkie-talkie, and we hear Daryl’s voice. Eugene picks it up, as the sound attracted some zombies. “Help,” he says weakly, before Tara and Rosita come to his rescue. The three are just able to get into a garage.
Morgan and Carol, who’d both just been visiting Morgan’s prisoner, make their way into an unfinished townhouse. Carol falls, and cracks her head on the pavement, giving her a nice gash and possible concussion. Their situation is bad, but what’s even worse is the predicament poor Dr. Denise is in: as we soon discover, she was left in the holding cell with that insane Wolf. They talk, and we learn a bit more about the Wolves’ philosophy. He says he isn’t killing people, he’s freeing them, and anything they take or plunder is solely for the furtherance of that goal. “You don’t belong here,” he says to her, and he’s not just talking about the holding cell. Denise, God bless her innocent soul, seems to take up the Morgan position that this lunatic can be saved, and it actually looks like she’s going to try to heal him (he got a nasty gash on a rusty car, and now has an infection).
Maggie escapes on her own, running, stumbling, landing on the ground and firing off a number of rounds as the undead close in on her. It actually for a split-second seemed like she might get it, but then after the whole Glenn story, there’s no way Gimple & Co. would kill off Maggie. So she makes for the only refuge available: a lookout tower on the wall. She’s barely able to make it up the ladder before it’s pulled away. Now she has no way back down, no way out. Speaking of Glenn, he and Enid are outside, seeing the destruction on the inside. Glenn immediately jumps into hero mode, trying to figure a way back in, but Enid is in JSS mode and wants nothing to do with it.
We haven’t mentioned it, but Jessie’s son, Sam, hasn’t been able to come down from the second floor of his house since the Wolves attack (which, in the timeline of this show, was no more than a day or two ago, and quite possibly only a day ago). He just sits up in his room, playing old 45s (google it, kids), eating cookies (which attract ants, hundreds of ants, kind of like, oh, well, you got the reference), and drawing pictures of the horrible things Carol said would happen to him if he told anybody that she was stealing guns (remember that?) When everybody comes barging in, carrying Deanna upstairs to an open bed, everything moves in slow-mo for Sam. The kid’s already petrified. Worse, Deanna they discover wasn’t just gashed by the table saw. She has distinct bite marks on her abdomen.
This is turning into the worst sleepover ever. Ron slinks into the garage, and Carl follows him. Ron is distraught, in despair. He’s at the point where he thinks everyone is going to die. Carl mentions rather matter-of-factly that his father will figure something out (and, of course, he does), but Ron’s not into that right now. He strolls over to the inside door, locks it, and pulls his pistol on Carl. Now, we never talk about the comics here, but we did know about one thing that happens to Carl in the comics, and we were sure it was going to happen right here.
It didn’t. Carl and Ron fight, the gun goes flying, Ron smashes a shovel through the outside door, and the noise attracts walkers. Rick hacks open the inside door with an ax, and now there are walkers coming inside. Holding them off is not going to work for long at all.
And Judith! We have long been of the mind that as violent and graphic as this show is, even Gimple & Co. don’t have the stones to kill a baby, that it would just be going a step too far, and because of that, Judith is probably the one character who can’t be killed. We thought that right up until we saw Deanna on her knees and leaning into Judith’s crib. For a moment, we really did think that Deanna had turned, and had shambled into that room and attacked the baby. Hey, Rick thought the same thing. She hadn’t, though. Turned. She wanted to see the baby one last time.
Throughout this, there’s a series of interesting exchanges between Deanna and Michonne. Deanna’s always been one with a strong sense of purpose, and even in her death she’s satisfied with the life she led, with the things she’s lived for. “I’m lucky,” she says, and then puts to Michonne the question: “what do you want for you?” It’s interesting, because Michonne might be one of the few people for whom we really have never been shown any kind of answer to that question. What does Michonne want? Does she even know? Michonne asks Deanna about the Latin inscription on the plans she drew up. “Someday this pain will be useful to you.”
Carol doesn’t trust Morgan, but the full scope of her distrust doesn’t become apparent until she flees when Morgan isn’t looking. Maybe it’s the concussion, but she runs and makes right for the holding cell. Which is good, because she’s saving Denise. But it’s bad because Morgan follows her right there, with his stick, and won’t let her kill the prisoner. “I’ll kill you to kill him,” Carol says, and maybe you’re thinking, couldn’t this have waited? Morgan was thinking that, too, and in fact says exactly those words. Whether or not Carol’s thinking right, she’s holding a knife in her hands, and threatening Morgan. That won’t do. With one flick of his stick, he knocks the knife out of her hands, but she has more fight in her than that, and a vicious struggle ensues. It was actually more brutal than we’d expected, and Carol was more formidable in hand to hand than we’d expected. But finally, Morgan picks her up and just slams her to the concrete. She just might be dead.
You know what’s coming next, right? The Wolf grabs Morgan’s stick and knocks him out cold. Talk about getting hoisted by your own petard. Tara, Rosita, and Eugene show up, but not before the Wolf gets the drop on Denise, and them. He takes Denise as his hostage, and locks the rest of them in that cell.
Rick falls back on an old plan: kill a couple of walkers, cover everybody in zombie guts, and stroll through the crowd. This is shocking to Jessie, Ron, and most especially Sam, but there really is little choice. “Anybody who stays here will die,” Rick tells them.
In the case of Deanna, that is true. She is upstairs, a revolver in her hand, planning to kill herself when the time comes. She hears the familiar scraping, grunting sounds in the hallway, and does something instinctive and defiant: she opens the door, and unloads her gun on the walkers in the hall. The last we see of her she lets loose a primal scream, a sort of rebel yell.
The rest of them end up standing on the porch, wearing bed sheets covered in zombie guts, surrounded by zombies. They grab each others’ hands, and make their way down the steps. “Mom?” Sam says. “Mom? Mom?”
Kid, shut up already. You’re gonna attract attention.