* BEWARE OF SPOILERS, DEATH, AND YES, OF COURSE, WALKERS*
It is one of the great cliches of death and dying that your life supposedly flashes before your eyes.
Having not shuffled off this mortal coil as of yet – unless of course I am going all Ghost on your blog-reading arse which let’s face it would be totally unique experience for you if not a whole lot of fun for me – and only having other peoples’ word for it, you have to suppose it’s true.
After all, it makes sense that when you are watching the last of your lifeforce trickle away like the final reluctant guests at a very long, quite enjoyable party, you’d ruminate quickly or slowly, depending on the remaining time allotted to you, on what you had achieved and whether it was to your liking.
It can’t be an easy experience for anyone to go through in normal times, but in a zombie apocalypse where sheer survival mandates you must violate any one of a thousand personal and societal ethical principles and moral statutes on a daily basis, it must come close to downright existentially agonising, even if, like Tyreese (Chad L. Coleman), the latest lamb to Scott M Gimple’s end of days slaughtering block, you have done your utmost to keep your hands and conscience as unblemished as possible.
Accompanying Rick (Andrew Lincoln), Michonne (Danai Gurira), and Glenn (Steven Yeun) to Noah’s (Tyler James Williams) old gated community, Shirewilt, just outside of Richmond, Virginia, which may or may not be intact – it’s very much NOT intact, with bombed out houses, corpses scattered hither and yon, looking very much like it’s borne the front of a full-on assault – Tyreese is looking through a once-hopeful, now grief-stricken Noah’s old home when he’s attacked by a deceased family member.
It’s quick, brutal and sudden, with Noah forced to kill his own younger brother – one of a set of twins, whose photos adorn the walls, and with which Tyreese became fixated to the point of eventual, literal death – while Tyreese staggers back, hardly daring to believe he has suffered the worst of all possible zombie apocalypse fates.
“It [Beth’s death] went the way it had to, the way it was always meant to. My dad always told Sasha (Sonequa Martin-Green) and me that it was our duty as citizens of the world to keep up with the news. When I was little and I was in his car, there were always stories on the radio. Something happens 1000 miles away or down the block, some kind of horror I couldn’t even wrap my head around. But he didn’t change the channel, he didn’t turn it off; he just kept listening … Keeping your eyes open; my dad always called that ‘paying the high cost of living.'” (Tyreese to Noah)
Clutching his blood-soaked arm while Noah runs for help – not all that well as it turns out with walkers corralling him under a cane setting on a porch until Rick, Michonne and Glenn, alerted by his screams, come to his aid; but hey he is limping so cut him some slack will ya? – he is immediately confronted with a deathbed existential dilemma – has he done right by his life or has he failed, especially in this dark and bleak current day and age?
To help him sub-consciously sort out the wheat from the chaff of his life, he is joined, clearly only in his shocked and fevered mind, by a host of past characters acting as either judge, jury and executioner or as sweet angels of mercy, alternately accusing him in the most damning of ways or consoling him with mercy and tenderness.
In the first camp, unsurprisingly is the Governor (David Morrissey) who damns the doomed man before him for failing to live up to his commitment to do what it took to make Woodbury work, and Martin (Chris Coy), the man from Terminus Tyreese encountered outside the walls who threatened to kill Judith and whom he was unable to kill, who taunts him with the notion that if he had only had the guts to do what was needed that people, i.e. kill people, that friends of his like Bob (Lawrence Gilliard Jr.) might still be alive today.
This rather dark and altogether discomforting assault on a host of Tyreese’s life choices is mollified and counteracted to an extent by the likes of Bob, Lizzie and Myka Samnuels (Brighton Sharbino and Kyla Kenedy respectively) – whose deaths formed one of season 4’s, indeed the series’ most disturbing episodes, “The Grove” – and recently and dearly departed Beth (Emily Kinney) who assure him he did the right thing, that he stayed a good and true course and that everything is “better” now.
It’s a titanic battle of emotions and wills, a brilliantly-written way (Scott Gimple is in fine form in this episode) for Tyreese to reason through whether fate is immutable or not, whether things will play out the way they’re going to or whether you can influence them, and hence, whether he should have done more or the course he took was the right one.
“It’s OK, you weren’t a part of it.” (Bob assures Tyreese his hands and soul are clean)
It was soul-baring, deeply-moving, harrowing stuff, a heartbreakingly attenuated “flashing” before your eyes that lingered for what felt like an eternity, but was in reality not that long at all, that once again underlined what The Walking Dead does so well, which is philosophically look at the toll that extraordinary times take on hitherto ordinary, unremarkable people.
No real answers are given, but the fact that Tyreese pictures Beth, Bob and the girls in the van with him – they are overlaid by his subconscious on a desperate Rick, Michonne, Glenn and Noah, who having hacked off Tyreese’s arm are speeding him back to the rest of the gang – all of them affirming and giving him succour, suggests he found peace with the decisions he had made in the last fateful years of his life.
It was elegantly and poetically-written, and directed with subtlety and nuance, and a great sense of visual style – the opening gathering together of what are then disparate but later meaningful items and scenes such as Maggie (Lauren Cohan) grieving Beth, congealed black blood dripping onto a Thrift Store quality painting of a rural setting, the prison clocktower, and Judith in a crib are a thing of melancholic beauty – by Greg Nicotero, and reminded us that at the heart of everything The Walking Dead does, and the stories it tells, is the ongoing struggle of what does it mean to be human in a world where all humanity appears to be lost.
The weight of the world, though not a mortally-imperiled one thank goodness is weighing on both Rick and Glenn who discuss at one point whether they could’ve altered fate, whether anything they do such as honouring Beth’s wish to take Noah back to his home, makes any real difference.
Rick seems to think it matters, an impressive turnaround given his bleak outlook just a little while before, while Glenn, once the irrepressible Bluebird of Apocalyptic Happiness, darkly intones that he would’ve still wanted Dawn killed, and the man in the container at Terminus done away with in no uncertain manner.
Bleak though that particular mindset might seem, it is Michonne who is doing a psychic Atlas and trying to hold her beleaguered worldview above the seas of misery threaten to swamp it.
She is exhausted in every possible way and not ashamed to admit it, nor make it clear that they cannot keeping aimlessly running, running, running, that staying on the road all the time is chipping away, nay taking great walker-sized bites, out of their souls.
“We’re close. What if there are people there [Washington DC] huh? What if there’s some place we can be safe. We’re a 100 miles away. It’s a possibility, it’s a chance, instead of just being out here, instead of just making it. Because right now this is what making it looks like [she gestures to the scattered dismembered corpses around them]. Don’t you want one more day with a chance?” (Michonne)
To her surprise Rick agrees that they should head to Washington DC, restore some sort of purpose to the group, not to mention narrative momentum to the show, and so after a gruelling burial service officiated at by Father Gabriel, who is apparently good for something, which saw a broken Sasha barely able to spade a sod of soil into her brother’s grave, they presumably hit the road once more, heading into goodness knows what but amidst all the grief and pain and loss, feeling like they at least have some sort of control, some sense of choice, restored.
“What Happening and What’s Going On”, drawn from Tyreese’s musings about his father’s dictum that you needed to be informed so you knew what had to be done in life, was a powerful episode, full of arresting, emotionally-evocative visuals, dark, harrowing and long moments of the dying soul, and somehow in all the misery and sadness, a renewed sense that something else awaits.
Quite how they keep managing to pluck shards of hope from a morass of despair is beyond me but they do, and so Rick’s much put-upon troop live to fight another day, if barely, in next week’s episode “Them” …