The Walking Dead Season 4, Episode 2 Recap ‘Infected’: A New Threat Looms Overhead

A new threat comes after the survivors to remind them that even behind walls, the danger is never far away on The Walking Dead…

By Scott Harris — Staff Writer

There’s a classic campfire ghost story with a punchline so chilling, the rest of the story isn’t even necessary to know. You know the one. It’s the one where the police officers finally pinpoint the location of the killer who’s been making all those threatening phone calls, and it turns out the calls were coming from inside the house.

GET OUT! GET OUT NOW!

I’d wager even the crustiest of slasher movie veterans (of which I am most assuredly not one) feel a tugging sensation inside the innards with that one. And with the All Hallow’s moon on the wax, it’s fitting that the second episode of The Walking Dead’s fourth season would press that and a few other choice horror-show archetypes into service. Yes, I do realize the zombie show is always scary. But this one dug deep. Though the official episode name was “Infected,” I would have personally gone with “It’s Coming From Inside the House, You Fools.”

Remember that tween who closed the season premiere by falling dead in the shower in a pool of his own blood and then reanimating? Yeah, he started eating people. And then they reanimated. The first portion of the episode consisted of the writers and directors playing sadistic older sister to the helpless television audience, slowly and deviously twisting the sewing needle deeper into the skin of the balloon, while viewers could only sit by and wait for the inevitable pop. Dark corners! Fluttering curtains! Sputtering flashlights! What was that noise? Oh, it was just a pig grunting.

In this case, the pop in question was the discovery that there were walkers—altogether now—Coming From Inside The House! Good unison on that one there. The infiltrators were finally discovered (offscreen, sadly and oddly) and dealt with, but only after several deaths (good thing they just got a new shipment from Woodbury). There’s now a mystery to solve, but the braintrust quickly—maybe too quickly—gets to the bottom of things. They deduce that some kind of airborne germ is afoot, with the power to quickly kill innocents and dispatch them to the dark side. They figure this out with the help of Dr. Subramian, a doctor and prison newcomer who apparently exists entirely to explain this one disease and then disappear again. In the words of Dr. S., the new germ kills people because of “internal lung pressure building up, like when you shake a soda can and pop the top, only imagine your eyes, ears, nose, and throat are the top.” Thank you, Doctor.

Back on track here. The key point here is that, yes, someone or a group of someones among the show’s creative leadership has been re-reading The Stand. And as a result, we now have two bugs: the airborne one that is fatal within hours and the one that lives inside all of us and turns us into zombies after we die. As the gang works to address this peanut butter cup of doom with quarantine protocols and what not, a rather large gaggle of walkers has mysteriously built up in a specific area of the prison’s outer fence. When the good guys roll in to kill them off, Sasha notices a few mouse corpses in the area, and wonders aloud: “is somebody feeding these things?” Flash back to the episode’s opening scene, in which a live mouse dangles in the dark, a flashlight beam behind it. Whoever’s doing the deed, it’s someone who is inside the, eh, right.

Now for the English-major portion of the episode, embodied in Rick’s sometimes-interesting, sometimes-really-not inner monologue about What It Means to Be A Good Man, or some such. This season, Rick traded in his six guns for a shovel, and has been working the land to raise food for his growing colony. But now, with the walkers prepared to breach the fence, he has to act quickly, and decides to ride outside the perimeter with the pigs he’s been breeding, but now must sacrifice to draw the walkers away from the prison. (These are the same pigs, by the way, that some in the braintrust believe may have caused the airborne disease outbreak.) Pork is a sumptuous and luxurious item, even in today’s pre-apocalyptic world. Rick wants to find civilization again. He wants a safe and sensible world. But at the end of the episode, with the hog pen burning, Rick gives his son Carl his gun back, and then proceeds to strap his own heavy piece back around his waist. Civilization will have to wait.

OK, back to the scarefest. The walkers are gone, but the true evil of “Infected” still lies within. Tyreese’s new squeeze Karen presented earlier with a rather nasty cough; off to the quarantine area with her. At the close of the episode, Tyreese paid her a visit, only to find a trail of blood leading out of her cell. A trail of blood that keeps going, and widening. Eventually, the trail leads outside, where Tyreese finds her charred remains alongside those of another patient. NOOOOOOO! This was the work of no walker, I tells ya. It was one of the denizens of this so-called civilization in this prison here. Whoever did this is still….I can hear you saying it. Nice.