The Walking Dead Recap ‘What Happened and What’s Going On’: The Struggling Man

In the latest Walking Dead recap, Rick and the survivors head towards Virginia but danger lurks around every corner and another member of the group says goodbye….

By Damon Martin — Editor/Lead Writer

Loss isn’t something that should surprise you when it happens on The Walking Dead — at this point in the game, you should expect it.

Death is all around the survivors in the zombie apocalypse, but the hard part is living and it’s something Tyreese struggled with for the past two seasons. When Carol killed his beloved Karen, Tyreese suffered a disconnect as he tried to understand where he fit in while attempting to keep some part of his own humanity amidst the madness and lunacy of this new world.

Tyreese found out the hard way on ‘The Walking Dead’ midseason premiere titled ‘What Happened and What’s Going On’ that to live you have to do more than fight not to die. He lost that battle, but ultimately found peace because Tyreese had done all he could do and there were no more roads left to travel. He was ready to go.

With that let’s recap The Walking Dead season 5 midseason premiere titled ‘What Happened and What’s Going On’.

The Longest Road

The beginning of the episode is a discombobulated set of pictures and videos that are meant to disorient the viewer — a close-up of a shovel digging in the dirt. A picture of two twins on the wall. Father Gabriel giving a eulogy. Maggie in tears. A picturesque house in a frame, still unbroken, but soon dripping with blood. All signs are pointing towards a funeral and after Beth died (in our world) just one episode ago, some of this started to make sense.

Or did it?

The action picks up with Rick discussing the group’s next move with the rest of the survivors. Beth was trying to escape the Hospital from Hell to try and help Noah get home to his family. He and his father ended up in Atlanta and got taken into the hospital, but soon they found out that the bill they owed could never be paid. Once his father died, Noah was left to fend for himself but all he could ever dream about was going home to a little town outside Richmond, Virginia to find his mother and twin little brothers.

As if it was Beth’s dying wish, Rick decides to honor his fallen comrade while hoping that Noah’s town of 20-people living behind walls could serve as a new landing spot for their group. The prison was the last time they all truly felt safe, and doesn’t it feel like those days were so long ago? So everyone piles in cars and heads for Virginia.

One thing I absolutely loved about this sequence was the next thing you know, the group is 500 miles into the trip and nearing the housing development Noah once called home. In the old days (and this isn’t a dig on any particular show runner), the rest of this season would have been spent on the road to Virginia, encountering any number of threats or issues, cars breaking down, people being eaten and then at the end, finally, they reach wherever they’ve been going. In season five, the show has shifted direction dramatically to focus on where they’re going and not so much the road traveled. In one scene, Rick and the group are talking about going to Virginia and the next they’re already there. Clearly this could chew up some serious time for the show catching up to the comic book source material, but it’s nice to see the TV series keep a closer eye on the destination instead of how we get there.

As the group closes in on the town outside of Richmond, Noah and Tyreese bond a little bit in the car. Noah tells Tyreese that the plan to make the exchange for Beth was the best plan possible and it almost worked until it didn’t. Tyreese counters with the situation played out the way it did because that’s the way it was meant to play out all along. Like fate was predetermined and this was always going to be the way things ended for Beth and Dawn back in that hospital.

Tyreese also goes on to talk about growing up with his sister Sasha and the importance their father put on the siblings never turning a blind eye to what was going on in the world around them. While the nightly news can often times seem like a bland, depressing 30 minutes of shootings, wars and the latest courtroom battles, Tyreese and Sasha’s father refused to allow his children to grow up in a world they didn’t understand. Don’t blind your eyes to what’s going on around you. Seeing the world for what it is, is the only way to truly survive it. His father called it the high price of living.

Tyreese not only understood it, but by the end if this episode, he felt the brunt of those words like a sword cutting through flesh.

Welcome to Fist City

With Carol, Darryl and the rest of the crew trailing behind them by a good five miles, Rick, Tyreese, Michonne, Glenn and Noah arrive at the city behind the walls to find out of there are still people there living in a society or if the worst has already happened. The scouting party is meant to investigate while Carol and the rest of the team waits to hear from them periodically and if they don’t get the call, come in guns blazing.

When they reach the gates, they notice there’s no spotter atop the wall looking for trespassers much less somebody knocking off random walkers that might be strolling by. Glenn hops onto the wall and looks before turning back and simply shaking his head because what he saw inside was answer enough to know this wasn’t going to be the group’s next home. Noah knew what it meant as well and regardless of his wounded leg, he hopped the wall and fell down inside of a town he once called home.

Except what was left inside looked more like a town that once lived, but no longer does. The streets were empty, houses boarded up or burned out and one lonely walker dragging his feet looking for the last remnants of a town ravaged by the dead. Noah is devastated, but there’s still work to be done.

Rick takes everybody minus Tyreese, who stays with a grieving Noah, to look around town and see if anybody is left alive or if this was just a 500-mile lost cause.

Breaking Point

As Michonne breaks open a shadow box to take a perfectly clean jersey that was once decoration and now serves as a new shirt for somebody in need, Rick discusses the last few days with Glenn and how he’s changing once again in this ever changing world. It doesn’t seem so long ago that Rick was conflicted about even lifting his gun and instead focused on the important things in live like raising crops and breeding pigs. Now Rick is a guy who sets up an ambush on a group of cannibals and lops them up with zero regard if there was any chance of saving them because he’s finally living under the motto ‘it’s us or them’.

So back at the hospital when Dawn shot Beth, Rick immediately knew it was an accident. He could see it in Dawn’s eyes that she didn’t mean to put Beth down. But even in that split second it didn’t matter to Rick. She took one of theirs and he wanted to put her down. Glenn explains how back at Terminus when they opened the one container and Rick Rubin came running out at them, wild-eyed and crazy as a rat in a tin shit house that the only way he could quiet him down was the bash his head in with a baseball bat. There wasn’t time to think about saving him or bringing him back from the brink. At that moment, it was all about putting him down and moving on to the next one because that’s what had to be done.

Long story short, it’s getting easier for both Rick and Glenn to kill the living without really questioning the action. Michonne chimes in by saying ‘you can be out here too long’. Like a soldier who is in the field continuously without any kind of mental break. They live on the edge because they have to. It’s a big part of the reason why Michonne is pushing for the group to either find a way to make this town work again or head to Washington D.C. to find somewhere else to stay instead. They’ve all been out here too long and it’s time to rest their weary heads even if it’s just for a few nights.

The Struggling Man

After a few tear soaked minutes at the gate wondering what happened to his family, Noah finally gets up and makes a run for his old house. Tyreese gives chase and when they finally arrive, the front door is open, blood is splattered everywhere and it’s clear that if anybody was alive here at one time, they probably aren’t anymore. Tyreese opts to go in first and runs into a badly charred female body laying on the ground, rotted out with a moon roof out of the top of her head. Noah can’t wait any longer and he rushes in — while he never speaks a word, it’s clear this was his mother. He covers her up with a blanket while Tyreese continues to explore.

Through the back hallway, Tyreese hears a walker trapped behind a door, but it’s not an immediate threat. He goes into an open bedroom and finds a little boy dead on his bed and he’s not getting up again. Tyreese starts to explore and look at the pictures on the wall when he finally notices that there are two boys not just one. Two brothers in addition to Noah. By the time he wonders ‘what happened to the other brother?’, his arm is getting bitten into and Tyreese is officially a goner.

Noah rushes in and uses a plastic plane to stab his brother through the eye (creativity points right there) and rushes off to find Rick and the others to bring Tyreese help.

While Noah is gone, Tyreese begins to immediately shift to fever dreams because there’s a voice beside him and when he looks, he sees Martin still sitting on the ground chewing his gum. Martin tells Tyreese that if he just would have killed him when he had the chance, maybe Gareth wouldn’t have ever found their group at the church and maybe Bob would still have his leg. Domino shit you know?

But then the ghost of Bob appears and tells Tyreese to stop paying attention to this Bubble-Yum bastard because he got bit at the food pantry and he was going to die either way, even if Gareth didn’t show up. Tyreese’s visions also include a visit from Lizzy and Mika, who tell him that it’s much better now and he can join them (in death). The Governor shows up as well taunting Tyreese saying that he promised to do whatever he could to help yet he stood there and forgave the woman who took Karen’s life. There’s also a radio playing throughout this sequence with a news report that keeps playing, talking about the atrocities taking place right now. Like his father always said, Tyreese had to know what was going on in the world and he was finding out by this radio message that things are bad all over. And then there’s Beth back on our screens, stitched up wound still on her face and she’s belting out Jimmy Cliff’s ‘Struggling Man’ (and doing a great job FYI).

The lyrics are rather timely when given the gravity of Tyreese’s situation:

“Everyman has a right to live
Love is all that we have to give
Together we struggle by your will to survive
Then together we fight just to stay alive

Struggling man has got to move
Struggling man, no time to lose
I’m a struggling man
And I’ve got to move on”

In between the affirmation he’s receiving from Bob, Lizzy and Mika and Beth’s harmonious tune, Tyreese is also getting plenty of badgering from the Governor and Martin before his fever dream breaks and he realizes that the vision standing in front of him is actually another walker trying to get a bite for dinner. Ultimately, Tyreese knows he’s already as good as dead but he still has some fight left in him so he allows the walker to chomp down on his forearm while he grabs a rock and smashes its head in at the same time.

The next time his fever kicks in, Tyreese is again being told that it’s okay to move on and it’s so much better on the other side and when he comes to it’s Rick and the rest of the group grabbing his arm while Michonne lops it off Hershel style.

They carry him back to the car while fighting off walkers and once they arrive Tyreese is in bad shape getting worse. His fever dreams still have him seeing visions, but this time it’s only the people that stood by him before. Lizzy and Mika are encouraging him to let go. Bob turns off the radio because he’s done listening and Beth turns while driving and promises it’s all okay. Moments later Tyreese finally expires and despite their greatest efforts to save him, one more survivor is gone.

So we flash back to the beginning of the episode — a shovel digging in dirt, a sermon being read over a grave and a group saddened by a loss. But unlike our first instincts to believe this was all about Beth, as it turns out it was a sad goodbye to Tyreese. Sasha stands over her brother and puts a pile of dirt down while she’s overwhelmed by tears. Finally, Rick kneels down and furiously shovels the rest of the dirt over Tyreese as another friend is left dead on the road.

He proclaims that Washington D.C. is their next best hope. Maybe there is some kind of infrastructure that survived when the zombie apocalypse started. Maybe there is hope in a bunker or fallout shelter where politicians were ready for this sort of thing to happen.

Maybe, just maybe there’s a chance they can finally rest their heads because at this point, they’ve all been out here just a little too long.

The next episode of The Walking Dead airs Sunday night at 9pm ET on AMC