The Walking Dead season five, episode 15: Try – recap

Rick finally makes his intentions about Alexandria clear as Sasha deals with past trauma and things get very messy indeed

Spoiler alert: this blog is published after The Walking Dead airs on AMC in the US on Sundays. Do not read on unless you have watched season five, episode five (which airs in the UK on Fox on Mondays)

Ambiguity is something that television isn’t really comfortable with. Sure, shows like The Sopranos and Breaking Bad are complicated, but the writers always portray the heinous acts their main characters commit as atrocious, no matter how appealing Tony Soprano and Walter White might be. That is not true of this season of The Walking Dead, a show whose most unmooring aspect is that it no longer telegraphs to the audience exactly how it should feel about the life-and-death decisions its characters make. The scenarios, for both the characters and the audience at home, seem to beg the question of how we can impose the morality of our world on this new post-zombie world order.

Take the first scene of Sunday night’s episode. Deanna puts her dead son Aiden’s “Run Mix” CD in the stereo and the grieving family listens to the music that he would blast from the car when going out to shoot zombies. That such a thing even exists points out the problems with Aiden’s character and the pseudo-modernity the people of Alexandria are living in. It shows their obliviousness to the world they live in, as does how gutted the family is by Aiden’s loss. They are people that don’t know they’re mourning a coward and are so unaccustomed to the rampant slaughter of the world that they have the luxury of still taking time to mourn. Rick and his crew would find this deplorable, but isn’t it humanizing? Aren’t they right to feel their sadness, no matter what sort of man Aiden was?

That’s the conflict here: an old way of thinking as exemplified by the privileged and weak residents of Alexandria, and a new way of thinking adapted by the downtrodden and strong members of the Ricktatorship. The odd thing is, they’re both right and they’re both wrong. The show makes it impossible to root for either of them. Maybe what it’s really rooting against is the division. When Rick talks to Glenn after he returns from the disastrous run, Glenn tells him that there is no more us and and them, that they are all united. This seems to be the only healthy sentiment, one of acceptance and togetherness. But at what cost?

Things come to a head between Deanna and Rick over Pete, who is beating his wife Jessie – who Rick is developing feelings for and whose son has been telling Carol what goes on in their home. Deanna tells Rick that she knows all about it and was hoping it would get better. He’s outraged that she knew, but it shows that, as a leader, Deanna has had to make moral compromises as well, but refuses to execute anyone. However, she will banish people. This seems like a matter of semantics, because abandoning any of the people in her settlement to the wild would lead to their death. She’ll let them die, but won’t do it at her hand. Just as she thinks she has the moral high ground, it’s impossible to let her have it.

Rick decides to take matters into his own hands and talks to Jessie, letting her know that if she stays with Pete it won’t get better and she will eventually die. Jessie seems to finally understand him and tells Pete that he needs to leave, but Pete flies off the handle. He and Rick start beating each other, and their fight erupts out the front window of the house and spills over into the street.

This is how things get twisted between the “us and them”. Just as Nicholas (who, it turns out, is the one who stole Rick’s gun from the blender) lies to cover his ass and says that Glenn is to blame for Aiden’s death, Rick spouts off and looks like the dangerous person in the altercation. He was trying to defend himself and Jessie, but because he pulls out a gun and tells the crowd that has gathered on the street that they need to “fight or die”, he looks like a maniac.

Michonne, Rosita and Sasha

Michonne steps in at the last minute and pistol-whips Rick, knocking him out and ending the confrontation. It looks like the new constable is going to be the one in jail.

Michonne had been on her own quest for peace. When Rosita tells Michonne that Sasha has been up in the tower all night shooting at zombies, they get worried about her and go to track her down. It turns out that she goes off into the woods trying to kill as many walkers as she can find. “I’m tired of being on the defensive,” she says, but it really just seems like she’s suffering from some serious PTSD.

Naturally she draws a crowd of zombies, and she dispenses a few dozen of them with the help of Rosita and Michonne. Michonne, who was one of the driving forces behind the group seeking civilization in Alexandria, seems to miss part of the action of living out in the wild. But as Sasha is indiscriminately killing walkers, she sees flashes of her former self, walking around with two jawless biters on chains and indiscriminately slicing the heads off monsters. She decides she doesn’t want to go back to that.

That’s why she doesn’t have Rick’s back when he loses control. Like Glenn, she’s trying to put the unity in community. The only way she can achieve that is by sacrificing Rick, a symbol of the mentality that it takes to live beyond the walls.

Speaking of beyond the walls, Aaron and Daryl (who I hope will fall in love and make out on the back of a Harley) find a crazy serial killer living out in the woods. He’s the one who is carving a W in people’s heads, killing them, and then letting their reanimated corpses attack the walls of the city (where Sasha, still in her PTSD tower, quickly dispenses of them with her sniper rifle). Aaron and Daryl find a mutilated body on the ground and a woman who was strapped to a tree naked for zombies to devour.

Who could this person be, and where is he finding all these live victims? It’s not like there are just tons of individuals roaming the woods alone looking for shelter, are there? Could it be someone from Alexandria who is calm on the outside, but really freaky on the inside? Maybe it’s Gabriel, who seems crazier each week. Or Deanna’s husband, who I never really trusted. Could it be someone from the show’s past who we haven’t seen in awhile? Or maybe it’s the Yellow King from True Detective and he’s crossing over to an AMC show. While The Walking Dead has been trafficking in intractable ambiguity, there is no doubt that whoever is doing this is a sicko.

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