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Feb 19, 2015 By Matt Fink Web Exclusive

[Spoiler Alert: If you haven’t seen the latest episode of The Walking Dead then read no further.]

As bleak as the world of The Walking Dead can be—women dying in childbirth, people getting their heads chopped off, cannibals eating their captives to survive—it’s possible the true day-to-day reality of the undead apocalypse would be both more horrifying and far more mundane. While hordes of hungry zombies and menacing neighbors make for better TV drama, the real day-to-day killers likely would be finding a clean water source, a regular food supply, and enough strength to go day after day with no reason to believe things will ever get better. This is the world The Walking Dead shows us in “Them.”

Now three weeks in since leaving Atlanta and 60 miles from Washington D.C., the group is in rough shape. Little water, no food, no transportation—they’re barely ambulatory, searching for muddy water in the baking Virginia sun as they trudge on to next their destination. Maggie cries alone, then laps up her tears before half-heartedly stabbing a walker. Daryl eats an earthworm he finds in the dirt. Sasha pokes at dead frogs in a dried up creek bed. Back in the dysfunctional family days of Shane and Dale, Hershel called Rick and his people a “plague” that landed on his farm. Drought, famine, dead frogs—it appears that a plague of biblical proportions has finally caught up to them.

Religious references dominate the episode. When Gabriel offers to carry out his priestly duties and help Maggie talk through her grief over losing both her father and half-sister, she confirms that she has lost her faith in God. When Gabriel persists, she snaps at him, reminding him of how he turned his back on his congregation and left them to die when they needed him most. “Don’t act like that never happened,” she growls, triggering a crisis of faith in him, as well.

It gets even darker. When Maggie finds a bound and gagged walker that looks a bit like Beth in the trunk of a car, she can’t bring herself to kill it but can’t walk away from it, either. We can almost see her think through what she’s seeing: was this girl kidnapped? How long did she suffer? How could this happen? After Glenn finishes it off, she explains how she has been crushed by false hope, how every expectation is soon dashed. “Before, this was just the dark part,” she says of their current plight. “I don’t know if I want to fight it anymore.”

Daryl is in no better shape. For all of the growth we’ve seen in his character over the past five seasons, the core of him has remained remarkably stable. He’s still an abandoned little boy trapped inside a warrior’s body, scared to lose those who are closest to him but too guarded to express any of the guilt or loss he feels. This is when he’s at his most compelling, and he’s never been at a lower point than during this episode, spending most of his time trying to get away from the rest of the group to distract himself by combing the woods for food. “You have to let yourself feel it,” Carol pleads, kissing him on the forehead in a way you imagine his mother never did. Instead, he later slinks off alone to burn himself with a cigarette, the act of self-mutilation seemingly granting him permission to finally break down and cry.

If Daryl is coping with his grief by turning inward, Sasha is the opposite, translating her disaffection into recklessness. When the group attempts to dispatch approaching zombies by pushing them into a ravine, Sasha ruins the plan, breaking from the pack and hacking the walkers to pieces. When Abraham (who she nicked while wildly swinging her machete earlier) offers her a drink, reminding her that they’re all friends, she retorts “We’re not friends.” Any mentions of Tyreese are met with icy stares. If Maggie wants to give up and Daryl wants to get away, Sasha wants to pull everyone down with her. They’re pretty much already there.

Abraham is drowning his sorrows in a bottle of alcohol. Gabriel, still smarting from Maggie’s comment, burns his priest’s collar. Noah hangs around the periphery of the group like a kid on his first day at a new school. “I don’t know if I’m going to make it,” he confesses to Sasha. “Then you won’t,” she replies coldly. “I truly do not know if things can get worse,” Eugene says with a sense of disbelief. “They can,” Rosita says, staring off into the distance. What a happy bunch!

And yet, in the middle of all of this despair, there are flickers of hope. After Rick and Abraham decide against allowing the group to drink some bottled water provided with a sign reading “From a Friend,” the skies open and pour down rehydration upon them. For a moment, they’re kids again, catching the rain in their mouths and splashing in the water. (All except Maggie, Daryl and Sasha, who look as if the rain as yet one more inconvenience.) Their respite is short-lived, however; the clouds overhead are ominously dark.

After finding shelter in a nearby barn, they build a fire and reflect on their plight. Rick opines that he used to feel bad for children growing up in the apocalypse, but he’s rethinking his position. Tellingly, the most unfazed person in the group appears to be Carl. Earlier in the episode he gave Maggie a broken music box he found, the sort of gesture that is both sweetly optimistic and astoundingly naïve, as if such a functionally useless item could lift the spirits of someone in her lowest moment. But Carl still sees the old world, the one where music boxes and meaningless gifts meant something. He’s holding on to it.

Of the adults, only Michonne is similarly unaffected. When Rick says kids are better equipped to adjust to a world gone to hell, she disagrees with the premise. “This isn’t the world,” she says, equating such a belief with “giving up.” Rick counters that it’s the only world they have, then offers a soliloquy on hope and despair, one that could provide a new thesis for the series. They will accept their fate—that they “are the walking dead”—and they will survive one day at a time. But before they can reflect on the implications of the statement, they’re back on the defensive. As the rain pours, a herd of walkers is approaching.

In the episode’s moment of culmination, the group’s members rush to reinforce the barn’s doors one by one—Daryl, Maggie, and Sasha leading the way. Here, momentarily setting aside their grief, they are made a team again. And the next thing we know, it’s morning. Everyone is fine, and Maggie wakes up with a new perspective. Waking Sasha, the two go outside to enjoy the sunrise, walking through a scene of scattered, broken zombies who were twisted and torn apart by falling trees. Their last plague—a storm that could have blown down the barn and killed all of them—actually saved them. Maybe their luck is about to change.

For an episode that ranks near the most depressing in the series’ run, “Them” actually ends on a positive note (or as close to positive as any episode of this show can). Of course, just as everything seems right in the world of The Walking Dead, a stranger who looks like he just stepped out of an L.L. Bean catalog emerges from the woods and identifies himself as Aaron. He’s a friend, he says, and he apparently has been scouting the group for some time, identifying Rick by name. “I have good news,” he says, as Maggie and Sasha lock their handguns on him. Just how good that news is will determine the course of the rest of the season.

Questions for the next episode:

Was the barn sequence a dream?

The strange editing of the zombie herd’s advance on the barn has led some viewers to suggest that perhaps the whole scene was Maggie’s dream. We never see the zombie herd stop their advance, only the aftereffects of that storm. The fact that Maggie and Sasha seem genuinely surprised to find the walkers torn apart the following morning suggests that they were unaware that such an event had taken place. How could the group simply go back to sleep in the barn if they didn’t even know how or why the zombie threat was repelled? Could the whole attack on the barn have been Maggie’s dream, the product of her subconscious desire for a restored sense of hope and unity within the group? We’ll probably never know.

So who is Aaron?

Okay, readers of the comics are pretty sure who Aaron is, because he’s a significant character. If the representation is faithful to the graphic novel, he is going to usher in a new phase in the storyline, one that will significantly change the composition of the group and their living situation for the foreseeable future. This isn’t going to be a Terminus-like subplot that is resolved in two or three episodes; it’s essentially the conclusion of part one of the story. We could be working through this new storyline for the better part of two or three (or more) seasons.

Could Daryl be on the verge of leaving the group?

He spends most of the episode trying to get away from everyone else, and he seems to react badly to Rick’s “we are the walking dead” speech. “We ain’t them,” he says, apparently referring to the monsters they’ve been chased by for the past five seasons. Could there be tension between Rick and Daryl? Norman Reedus recently gave an interview where he predicted “shifting alliances” over the course of the rest of season five. As the group brushes up against yet another survivalist community, could Daryl decide to go off on his own?

Has Maggie worked through her grief or will she sink deeper into depression?

She already said that she’s unsure if she can continue fighting, leading some to speculate that Maggie could take drastic measures to end her own suffering. No doubt, the writers pointed us in that direction throughout the episode. When Maggie discovered the walker in the barn, she remarked that “She could have shot herself.” She seems to have rallied some resilience by the end of the episode, but the clues dropped throughout the episode seem to be pointing to something larger. But would the writers really snuff out the last of the Greene family so soon after killing off Hershel and Beth?

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