'The Walking Dead' recap 9 ('What Happened and What's Going On"): season 5, episode 9

The message is simple: this is a brutal post-apocalyptic world. People will die. Only five regulars (Rick, Carol, Carl, Glenn, Daryl) remain from season one.

The first half of season five featured two notable deaths of Rick’s crew. First, Sasha’s new squeeze Bob got bit and died in episode 7. In the mid-season finale aired in December, Beth was accidentally shot and killed in a botched hostage trade. This emotional damage lingers two months later as the second half bows.

The first two minutes show what appear to be bits and pieces of a hallucination that includes images of the prison, Woodbury, a walker inside a car, railway ties, bullet shots, a skeleton, photos of twins, Maggie mourning Beth’s death, Noah crying, exposition about going to Richmond, Mika saying “It’s better now.” A drawing of a home with blood dripping on it. The preacher Gabriel is seen at a funeral saying “What can be seen is temporary. What cannot be seen is eternal.”

It’s confusing and plenty foreboding. What is going to happen this hour?

Everyone allied with Rick who is still alive is finally back together but they are understandably battered by all the crap that had happened since the prison was destroyed.

They want to honor Beth in some way and decide to leave Georgia, probably for good. Noah told Rick that when they first tried to escape the hospital in Atlanta, she had planned to join Noah to venture to a neighborhood outside Richmond where he had last seen his mom and twin brothers. It’s a walled space, Noah said.

Rick thinks maybe this might finally be a place where they can just settle down. If it’s gone? “We keep going,” Rick says.

We see no debate among the crew about this idea.

Rick takes Noah and some of the strongest team members (Michonne, Glenn, Tyreese) to drive 500-plus miles to Virginia. They appear to be a reconnaissance crew ahead of the rest of the survivors.

We don’t see any struggle to find gas for such a long trip. You’d think gas would be increasingly hard to find given how much time has passed since the apocalypse began. (Three years?)

We don’t see the discussion about who should lead this trip. Splitting Glenn from Maggie as well as Sasha from her brother Tyreese seems needlessly arbitrary.

And how do they know the roads are clear? From what we see, the roads appear to be open. Or we simply don’t see any of the detours necessary to get to the destination. The writers probably decided this wasn’t going to make good TV.

Fortunately, they have really good walkie talkies with fresh batteries. Rick uses a walkie to talk to Carol, who with the rest of the crew are not seen but can’t be too far behind. Walkie talkies from what I can ascertain can work a few miles apart.

(Side note: I am not sure how the actors are compensated but not even Andrew Lincoln is in every episode. From what I can tell, they get paid only for episodes they appear in so you have to believe the visual absence of the likes of Michael Cudlitz and Chandler Riggs is as much a money-saving device as a creative one.)

The reconnaissance team hide their vehicle in the woods as they get close to the alcove. As they arrive, they are greeted not with guards or snipers. Just silence. Nobody answers when they knock. Not good.

Noah, despite a limp from an earlier injury, clambers over the fence and realizes almost immediately that walkers had over-run the joint. Humans had lost.

“We made it,” Rick tells Carol sadly via walkie talkie. “It’s gone.”

“Sorry,” Tyreese says mournfully to a despondent Noah. “You’ll be with us now.”

Tyreese watches Noah and tries to be philosophically optimistic, using his own recent past. “I wanted to die for what I lost,” he says. He says he never gave up even when he wanted to. As a result, he was able to save Rick’s daughter Judith during the Governor’s prison ambush. “That wouldn’t have happened if I had just given up, if I hadn’t chosen to live.”

“This isn’t the end, Noah.”

Glenn, Michonne and Rick sweep the village and kill off a few walkers before taking a break to talk.

They rehash the Beth situation. Both Rick and Glenn agree they knew what Dawn had done was an accident but they still wanted to kill her the way Daryl did. As a result, they ponder their own humanity and any ability to maintain that semblance of civilized behavior.

“We need to stop,” Michonne said. “We can’t be out here too long.”

Michonne wonders what should they do next? Stay nearby? Go closer to D.C.? Although Porter’s “save the world” scenario was a big fraud, she thinks D.C. might be a better bet. Rick agrees.

Noah runs to his old home. We see his mom, ossified and partly eaten. He places a blanket over her face. They inexplicably separate. Tyreese enters a room where a dead person lays in the bed. He sees photos of twins on the wall and stares at them so intently that he doesn’t hear one of the zombie twins who proceeds to gnaw his open arm. (Note to self in zombie world: cover your skin whenever possible, no matter how hot it is.)

When Noah sees what had happened, he quickly kills his zombie brother, then runs for help. Tyreese, in shock and losing blood quickly, starts hallucinating, including many of the images we saw earlier. He sees the cannibalistic dude he chose not to kill from episode one of this season who notes that scenarios might have changed if he had just killed him – like they would have never found them and eaten Bob’s leg. Ghost Bob pops up and says he had already been bit. It didn’t matter.

Lizzie and Mika then show up to tell Tyreese it’s okay to give in to death, that it’s “better here.” Beth sings a song because that’s what she does.

Then the Governor makes a cameo ghost return, repeating Tyreese’s season three assertion that he was going to “earn his keep” at Woodbury. (He soon figured out the Governor was bad and bolted.) “I know what happened,” Tyreese tells his hallucination Governor. “I know. You didn’t show me s***. You dead.”

To make matters worse, Tyreese gets attacked by another walker. In his weakened state, he has a hard time fending this zombie off, even dropping his patented hammer. Only when the walker latches onto his arm can he kill it.

By the time Rick and Michonne hack off Tyreese’s arm and gets him back to the car, he is extremely weak from lost blood. They drive back to the rest of the crew to see if they can cauterize his wound as they had with Herschel season three at the prison. But this time, it’s too late.

Ghost Beth, Lizzie and Mika tell Tyreese “It’s okay.” They give him permission to stop the fight.

He dies.

He dies a good man who could kill but always did it with a sense of dread and sadness. He adjusted the best way he could in this sad world and maintained his humanity. Losing this teddy bear of a man is a huge loss for a crew still reeling from Beth’s death.

The final scene apparently is the funeral for Tyreese, not for Beth, the presumption viewers probably made when they saw it at the start of the episode. And it makes you wonder: why is wimpy Gideon still alive?

[Another side note: The funeral was shot in a way that several of the regulars were not seen. Again, that was clearly a budgetary choice.]

Poor Sasha. She lost her new boyfriend and her brother in short order. Maggie, too, has been victimized by the loss of her father and sister in a span of a few weeks. But she still has Glenn – for now.

TALKING DEAD

"It was a love song, a ballad for this character," Chad Coleman said. "It's a crushing love story."

The boy's bedroom where Tyreese died was done in a soundstage as to avoid any spoilers about all the actors of dead characters returning.

The voice on the radio Tyreese heard in his fever dream is Andrew Lincoln in his British voice!

DEATHS

Porch walkers, gate grashing walkers, Noah's brother walker, arm gnawing walker and... Tyreese.