The Walking Dead: The Butcher or the Cattle

If we’ve learned something after four seasons of AMC’s The Walking Dead, then it’s the fact that in the post zombie outbreak world there is no safe place. Herschel’s farm. Woodbury. The prison. Each location was treated as a zombie-free oasis, and Rick strived to raise his son, Carl, as if the same rules and laws still applied.

At the end of season four, most of the cast converged on Terminus, a place that advertised stability and safety to those seeking it. Turns out, not so much. Season five opens with an especially brutal and gory episode engineered to prove that brutality wins the day.

As is said multiple times during the episode, you’re either the butcher or the cattle.

This episode, appropriately titled “No Sanctuary,” starts with “Then,” a flashback sequence that features terrified survivors (not our heroes) hiding in a darkened train car. The first presumption is that they are merely early victims of those who control Terminus, the midpoint of all railroads in Georgia where survivors of the zombie plague are lured for safety only to be callously slaughtered and made food for the remaining. Yup, Terminus is full of cannibals.

On the brink of certain death, Rick and company are miraculously spared by a mysterious explosion that distracts their captors. The explosion, we later discover, is the handiwork of my personal favorite Carol who doused herself with zombie blood and hitched a ride with a roaming horde of zombies attracted to the site by gunfire.

She leaves behind newfound-pacifist Tyreese, still suffering from last season’s brilliant episode “The Grove,” and baby Judith in the company of a captured Terminus member. In Carol’s absence, the captive taunts Tyreese and offers up his car as an escape mechanism. In his eyes, if you’re not willing to kill then perhaps you’re dead already. Tyreese wants to believe that’s not true. How long do you think that will hold? By the end of the episode, Tyreese regains his ability to kill, responding to a threat the prisoner makes against baby Judith’s precious life.

As Carol infiltrates Terminus, now bleeding with zombies, Rick and company wage all out war against not only the zombies but also against those who run Terminus. In Rick’s mind, the cannibals cannot be trusted and should perish at the hands of the flesh eaters. We are then subject to dozens of gruesome scenes of zombies gnawing intestines and necks (an interesting parallel to the end of season four when Rick did the same to save Carl from a child rapist) and even more scenes of the survivors hacking away at zombie corpses, stabbing their heads, etc. If you’ve seen even one episode of the show, then you know the drill.

One slightly comic aspect to the first few minutes is the recurring near-death experiences of the Glenn character. Slight spoiler alert: for those who have read the comics, Glenn dies at the hands of a group called the Saviors that bears a strong resemblance to those who occupy Terminus. Just as Glenn manages to avoid certain death at their hands, he is nearly killed a few additional times by walkers. Clearly, the writers are toying with us and challenging our notions of what happens in this universe as opposed to the universe of the comic.

As if to fully put Terminus behind us, the writers give Carol a scene in which she is nearly overpowered by Terminus big-wig Mary, the woman who was grilling “steak” when Rick and team arrived on the scene. Mary tells Carol that they once ran Terminus as a true safe haven until a roaming pack of outlaws took over, raping and killing many. The Terminus crew regained control of the center but, in a shift that’s admittedly not crystal clear to me, made the change over to cannibalism. Disgusted, Carol leaves Mary to the mercy of the zombies.

So, in a show that at its core cannot provide the ultimate answers we have now come to never expect, The Walking Dead spent an hour giving the audience everything it wanted out of last season’s tension-filled finale. In the end, the crew is fully reunited, Rick and Carol hug it out (remember he cast her out of the prison for making the hard choices he now seamlessly makes minute by minute), and we leave Terminus behind us for the next presumably gruesome chapter.

That said, the episode did provide two very intense emotional moments. Just when you think they’d sailed off into the unredeemable, the reunions of Carol and Daryl (a platonic reunion for those considering the recent Internet rumor that Daryl is gay) and especially of Rick and Carl with Judith were deeply felt and filled with honest, true emotion. We’ve always had the understanding that beast mode Rick was largely that way to protect those within his care, particularly Carl and Judith, but seeing that reinforced was a nice way to end the episode. He may have chosen the path of the butcher, but the audience has a sense that the dogged pacifist Rick still lives somewhere within.

Even if we don’t see the plague reversed or discover why it happened in the first place (I won’t go into spoiler territory here, but someone’s not on the up and up), it’s at least some comfort knowing that Rick and Carl as well as the other survivors will do whatever they can to preserve deserving life. Serving as a tiny beacon of hope, Baby Judith’s innocence is the biggest rarity in the show – something that must be guarded and secured and protected at all costs.

After all, it’ll be at least six years before Auntie Carol teaches her how to properly cut a walker down.