In The Walking Dead recap, Morgan’s journey takes him from the brink of insanity to a way of peace but how did he get there?
By Damon Martin — Editor/Lead Writer
Let’s just get this out of the way right now — we still don’t know what happened to Glenn and we may not know for a couple more weeks depending on how things play out.
That said, the follow up from last week’s intense episode that saw Rick and his cohorts attempt to divert a horde of walkers from Alexandria’s walls, was a 90-minute character study into what happened to Morgan from the last time we saw him until the stick wielding Zen master who reappeared last season.
When Rick first encountered Morgan it was moments after he woke up from a medically induced coma that most believed he wouldn’t come back from in the first place. Thanks to Morgan and his kindness, Rick survived those first days until he was finally able to make it back to his family. Morgan on the other hand wasn’t nearly as lucky as his son Dwayne died during their stay outside Atlanta and when he ran into Rick again, his mind was as jumbled as the chicken scratch writing he had on all the walls in the apartment he build as a one-main fortress to survive the zombie apocalypse.
Rick left Morgan there alone because that’s the only way he wanted to be, but eventually he found his path back to sanity and the real world with a desire to surround himself with people once again.
It wasn’t an easy journey by any means and that’s the tale that enveloped the latest episode of The Walking Dead as we took a 90-minute trip inside the mind of Morgan.
With that said, let’s recap the latest episode of The Walking Dead titled ‘Here’s Not Here’…
Have to Clear
The story starts this week with Morgan talking to the member of The Wolves he first encountered months ago on his road to Alexandria when a pair of scavengers attacked him and tried to ‘take everything’ from him. Instead of killing them, Morgan spared their lives and left them inside a broken down car to avoid a zombie attack. The same man eventually tried to kill Morgan again after his band of backwoods psychopaths attacked Alexandria. Now with the man tied up, Morgan decides to give him everything he has by explaining the story how he came back from the brink of madness to where he sits today.
Morgan didn’t lose his one room artillery because someone else invaded his home or because walkers found a way past all his traps. No, Morgan was evicted thanks to a one-sided conversation he had with himself while a lantern fell to the ground and ultimately burned the entire place to ashes.
From the cage he built for himself, Morgan wandered out into the world with a rifle, a helmet and a few supplies as he tried to find another place he could call ‘home’. Along the way, Morgan discovered that he was being followed by a man and his son, but rather than talk to them or make sure they weren’t attempting to attack him, he killed both of them with relentless and brutal force. For days on end, Morgan would sit in his makeshift camp as he burned bodies and scribbled all manner of insanity on the rocks that surrounded his sleeping are. From ‘clear’ to ‘here’s not here’, Morgan’s words didn’t seem to mean anything except to him.
Finally, while traipsing through the woods foraging for supplies, Morgan happened upon the sound of a goat from off in the distance. He eventually found the goat — alive and well — tied up in a yard behind some fences. There were some rudimentary traps set with cans and such to alert whoever lived there if walkers were coming near, but nothing Morgan couldn’t navigate with relative ease.
Once he reached the goat, Morgan started to untie it so he could claim it for his own, but a voice shouted out from the woods that the animal didn’t belong to him and he should let her go. Morgan began stalking around the house with his rifle in hand, trying to find the source of the voice that continued to warn him to stop or risk the consequences. Eventually when Morgan refused to give up his hunt, a large stick came flying down at his head and he fell to the ground unconscious but not dead.
Walking Through the Door
When Morgan awakens he finds himself inside a cell inside a cabin with a plate of food waiting by his head. When the man who captured him walks back in he introduces himself as Eastman (played brilliantly by John Carroll Lynch), a former forensic psychiatrist who worked for the criminal justice system back in Atlanta examining all manner of sociopaths before they were or weren’t released back into the world.
Without saying a word, Eastman digs into Morgan’s psyche with the precision of a scalpel as he pulls apart the living hell he’s been suffering through since the zombie apocalypse began. He deduces that Morgan lost his wife and probably a child and it’s clear by the state he’s in now that he loved them very, very much. But everyday Morgan woke up after they were gone, he would open the door to the outside and to his horror he kept seeing them dead over and over again. Instead of opening the door any longer to hopefully find a new day waiting for him, Morgan eventually stopped trying.
With Eastman hitting closer and closer to home, Morgan promises to escape this cell and kill him dead one day very soon because he has to ‘clear’ — it’s the only way he knows he’ll be safe. Eastman’s rebuttal once again took aim at Morgan’s new way of thinking. Why did he want to kill him? Why does he want to kill at all?
“We’re not built to kill. We don’t have claws or fangs or armor. Vets that come back with PTSD, that didn’t happen because we’re comfortable with killing. We’re not. We can’t be. We feel. We’re connected.”
~ Eastman
In the middle of his steady diet of breakfast, lunch and dinner, Eastman also serves up a book to Morgan called ‘The Art of Peace’ by Morihei Ueshiba, which is a collection of sayings, principles and application from the founder of Aikido — the stick fighting martial art that Eastman learned after talking to his daughter one day while looking for a path to channel his frustration and anger.
Throughout many one-sided conversations, Eastman eventually offers Morgan a choice — he can leave or he can stay and sleep on the couch from now on. Either is available because the entire time Morgan has been inside his cell, the door has been unlocked. Morgan finally tests it and sure enough, Eastman wasn’t lying. Rather than bunk down on the comfy couch, Morgan rushes Eastman and gets his ass kicked for his troubles. Morgan almost gets the better of him when he sees a fireplace poker he can use as a weapon, but Eastman eventually regains the upper hand. On the floor and defeated, Morgan begs for Eastman to kill him but this Aikido master has vowed to never take another life because all life is precious.
Despite an open invitation to sleep on the couch, Morgan once again crawls back into the cage and closes the door behind him because if no one can get to him, he’s safe (at least in his own fractured mind). Finally, Morgan wakes up from his own mental slumber when Eastman leaves one day to get supplies and asks his new roommate to keep an eye on Tabitha the goat to make sure no one or nothing hurts her. When Morgan hears a pair of walkers come through the fence, he finally jumps to his feet, kills them both and saves the goat from certain death.
When Eastman returns, he thanks Morgan for his help as he proceeds to pull the wallets from both walkers and buries them in a makeshift graveyard he started in the back. With each new grave made, Eastman puts a name plate for the person — zombie or not — who has been buried there.
Over the next few days/weeks, Morgan finally takes Eastman up on his offer to help him train in the way of Aikido as they learn staff fighting, gather food and eat together each and every night.
It’s there where Eastman tells Morgan how he got here after the world fell apart and the loss of his family, but it didn’t come from the zombie apocalypse but a very human threat instead.
A True Psychopath.
At dinner one night, Eastman opens up about his job while telling Morgan about the one true psychopath he encountered while he was working as a psychiatrist as the prison. A man named Crighton Dallas Wilton, who was put in prison for any number of awful things but was coming up for parole and it was Eastman’s job to evaluate him. Wilton said all the right things and did all the right things leading to his hearing, but Eastman was the one person who saw through his veneer of sanity.
“I saw right through him. I saw that he was a true psychopath.”
~ Eastman
In that moment, Wilton knew he was doomed and he attacked Eastman and beat him until it looked that he was drawing his last breath. Thanks to an Aikido submission attack, Eastman was able to counter with an armbar to get Wilton off of him. Eventually, Wilton was able to meet the right people and he made an escape from the prison, but he didn’t try to return to his old life or even get far, far away from the place that caged him for so many years.
He went straight to Eastman’s home and did his worst.
“Crighton Dallas Wilton went to my home and killed my wife, my daughter and my son. He walked down the street to the police station around the corner, covered in their blood and surrendered. Said that the only reason he broke out was to destroy my life.”
~ Eastman
So a year later with Wilton back on work patrol on a highway close to his house in Atlanta, Eastman built a cell inside the cabin he had in the woods with the intention of kidnapping the killer from his road gang and bringing him back there where he would be locked inside until he eventually starved to death. Eventually, Eastman came to his senses and followed the teachings of Aikido where all life is precious — even the most evil man.
Here’s Not Here
Eastman finally declares that it’s time he and Morgan left the cabin and tried to find other survivors because being alone out here wasn’t living, it was just waiting to die. But to forage out past the sanctity of this home, they’d need supplies, guns, armor and things to make it in the wilderness. Morgan knows where they can find these exact items — at the camp he built just before he met his sensei months earlier.
Back at the camp, Morgan finds the supplies and he finally reveals to Eastman his wife and his son’s name, who he lost along the way. While trying to gather things up, some walkers start rumbling towards them and Morgan is charged with dispatching them. But there’s a problem — the walker who is coming towards them is the same one Morgan killed without provocation in the woods just before he met Eastman. Now that he feels all life is precious, Morgan is confronted with his most dastardly actions.
He can’t kill the zombie and instead Eastman has to rush in to push his new friend out of the way and he gets bit instead.
Eastman eventually kills the walker and Morgan freaks out and tries to tell him that this is the one place he couldn’t go back to and yet here he stands. He tries to fight his mentor but once again Eastman defeats him and Morgan begs for death. Eastman knows he only has hours to life so he grabs the dead body, puts it back on his cart and starts back towards the cabin while Morgan sorts his shit out.
Morgan finally gets back to the cabin and finds a walker chewing on poor Tabitha and when he goes to the graveyard, he sees Eastman putting the zombie’s body into the ground. Morgan helps him back to a seat because the effects of the zombie bite are already starting to set in, but when he returns to bury the body he sees one name plate in front of him that virtually stares back — Crighton Dallas Wilton.
Eastman finally comes clean about that drive up the highway where he wanted to stop and take Wilton from his chain gang — except in reality he actually did it. Eastman stole the prisoner and escaped to the woods where the cops couldn’t find them and he left him in that cell to die. That’s when Eastman was in the exact same place he found Morgan when they first met.
“I let him starve to death. It took 47 days and then I was gone. I was where you were and I wasn’t trying to open up the door anymore either.”
~ Eastman
Eastman tried to turn himself in for the crime, but when he made it back to Atlanta, that’s when he discovered the world had fallen apart. Eastman tells Morgan that he’s finally ready to go and that there’s a gun in a lockbox in the house with a bullet that will finish him off. He tells his new friend that the cabin is all his if he chooses to stay and there are plenty of supplies, electricity and food to survive with but he implores him not to go that route.
“You stay here you’ll be alone. You were alone. Everything is about people. Everything in this life that’s worth a damn. It couldn’t be just me, it shouldn’t be just you.”
~ Eastman
In the end, Morgan buries his friend and marks his grave before setting off on his own again and running across that famous sign from two seasons ago that told of a place called Terminus — where all those who arrive survive.
Fast forward to Morgan’s conversation with the member of the Wolves who he has trapped. The psychopath tells him that he’d like to have the same path as Morgan but ultimately if he ever gets these ties taken off his hands, he’ll kill him and everybody else that lives in Alexandria because that’s what he’s meant to do. Morgan doesn’t give up, however, and he leaves the man in a basement apartment in the heart of Alexandria but unlike Eastman who trusted him enough to leave the door open, he locks the wolf in behind him.
As Morgan walks back onto the street, he hears the scream of Rick’s voice asking for the gate to be opened as he rushes off back into the fray to help the people who are still alive — because all life is precious.
The Walking Dead returns next Sunday night at 9pm ET with a brand new episode on AMC
