The Walking Dead Recap ‘Try’: Fight or Die

In The Walking Dead recap, Rick finally decides to intervene to stop Pete from hurting Jessie while Aaron and Daryl make a grisly discovery in the woods outside of Alexandria…

By Damon Martin — Editor/Lead Writer

In the aftermath of Aiden and Noah’s deaths last week on ‘The Walking Dead’, the newest episode titled ‘Try’ picks up just hours later as Deanna and her husband begin the mourning process over the loss of their son. While Carol’s attempt to console them with a tuna casserole ends with Deanna burning her note saying ‘we’re sorry’, the CD she plays in memory of her son really envelops what happens in this penultimate episode for season 5.

‘Somewhat Damaged‘ by Nine Inch Nails starts pumping over the speakers and the title track truly describes the main characters from Rick’s group of survivors including the leader himself.

What someone noted a few weeks ago really holds true today — ‘we were almost out there too long’ — but as it turns out maybe they were already out there, exposed to the elements of this world for just a little too long. While the people of Alexandria’s idyllic sense of survival will likely end with them dead or eaten, Rick and his people find themselves on the complete opposite end of the moral compass with only one option when it comes to making it work in this new, rotted world.

Fight or die.

With that let’s recap the latest episode of ‘The Walking Dead’ titled ‘Try’:

We are Them

Following a strange memorial for Deanna and her husband over the loss of their son Aiden, it’s time to start sorting through the facts of what went wrong on the run that ended with two people dead.

Nicholas — the gigantic coward who wanted to leave everybody behind — of course paints himself as the savior. It was Glenn’s fault that Aiden got killed because he distracted him during the fight with the walkers and it was also Glenn’s doing that got Noah killed when he tried to force Nicholas out into the open with walkers all around. Deanna listens and forces him to tell exactly what happened while things were still fresh in his mind and hopefully by watching Nicholas squirm in his seat she could tell that he was absolutely lying.

On the other side of town, Glenn tells his version of the story to Rick. He explains how he tried to save Noah but thanks to Nicholas, he could hold on and another member of their group perished. Glenn is worried about what Deanna and the others will say when hearing this story, but Rick isn’t concerned. He tells Glenn that they don’t live by Alexandria’s rules. Glenn answers back that they are no longer separate in this place — they are part of Alexandria.

Later that day while Nicholas cleans out the bloodstains from the back of the van undoubtedly left by Tara and her head wound (she’s stable by the way and going to recover), Glenn approaches and lays things out for him. Glenn tells Nicholas that no matter what he said to Deanna, he knows he’s responsible for what happened to Aiden, Noah and Tara. Nicholas is just lucky that he found himself in a place with high walls and lots of protection when the zombie apocalypse started because otherwise he’d be dead by now. Glenn says that Nicholas is no longer going on runs and he should stay behind Alexandria’s walls from now until the day he dies or the day the town crumbles. When Nicholas asks if this is a threat, Glenn answers back no, ‘I’m saving your life’.

At some point after the the confrontation with Glenn, we find Nicholas outside the walls unburying a canister he has hidden and inside is a gun — Rick’s gun that went missing just after the group arrived in Alexandria. Nicholas is the one who took it and hid it for himself just in case. Now he’s got the gun and you have to wonder if he’s taking it for protection because he’s scared of Glenn or if he knows eliminating ‘the threat’ is the only way his story is the one Deanna is forced to listen to.

Although he didn’t appear this episode, I’m curious where was Eugene in all this? He was present for most of the uprising at the warehouse when Aiden and Noah got killed and granted he’s part of Rick’s group, but couldn’t he back up what Glenn was saying? Just a curious observation.

Scared of You

Once again outside the walls — because living where it’s safe is apparently too easy — Carl is chasing Enid on another of her quests for rebellion. Despite his months spent watching Rick and Darryl hunt every manner of beast and human, Carl still can’t walk through the woods without sounding like a busted chainsaw because he gets within 10-feet of Enid and she already knows he’s standing there.

The two teenagers decide to go on a run through the forest because why the fuck not?

When they finally sit down for a rest, Enid decides to tell Carl that she’s scared of him but she’s not sure why. He discovers that Enid has a knife hidden in her backpack that belonged to her mother before whatever happened outside of Alexandria Happened to them.

A pack of walkers starts to roam nearby so Enid grabs Carl and they jump into the hollowed out section of a tree where they stand about six-inches away from each other. In the close quarters, Carl reaches out to touch Enid’s hand — the same one holding the knife — and then he pulls back. Why? Because he’s just as scared of her and she is him.

While inside the tree as the walkers pile by one by one, Enid makes a very smart observation — the world now belongs to the dead and they are just living in it.

Going On the Offensive

Michonne is still trying to figure out where she fits into Alexandria. Her new outfit suggests she’s a constable, but deep inside she still feels the tug and pull of the person who got really good at killing walkers. She’s also dealing with the loss of another friend as she stares at Noah’s clothes in a basket before Rosita comes in and interrupts her contemplation.

It seems Sasha has basically been living in the bell tower (that’s not cliché at all) and even when Abraham goes to relieve her, she’s not going home and getting some sleep. Rosita and Michonne decide to go outside the walls to find out where Sasha’s been going after he shifts because sleeping doesn’t seem to be very high on her priority list.

Once outside, Rosita tells Michonne how she quietly walked the edge not too long ago after Eugene told them there was no hope for being saved even if they did make it to Washington D.C. because he was just a big old liar. It appears almost everybody in the group was struggling to hold on in these past few weeks and Alexandria was the utopia that helped save them all — or at least most of them.

As they discover a trail of walkers scattered in the woods, all with gunshot wounds to the back of the head, they realize that it’s Sasha doing the deed. When they finally catch up with her, Sasha says the only way to reclaim the world is to go on the offensive and hunt the walkers instead of the humans always being the hunted.

Sasha is clearly not better after losing Bob and Tyreese in just a matter of weeks because any remnants left of the people she truly loved is gone. She screams at Michonne saying that the former sword wielding bad ass hasn’t lost what she’s lost. Of course Michonne knows all too well what it’s like to lose everything and have to fight tooth and nail to come back from the brink.

In the middle of their conversation, a pack of walkers starts circling the fresh meat that decided to wander into the forest. Instead of taking out a few of them and running for safety, Sasha decides to take them all on and she starts unloading round after round after round, plugging every walker in front of her. As the numbers start to grow, Michonne and Rosita are forced to begin killing them as well, but in the middle of it all as Sasha starts firing off bullets in rapid succession, a pattern starts to develop.

Michonne flashes back to the days when she was killing at will and taking out anything and everything that wasn’t breathing with no emotion about any of it. She goes all the way back to the day she found Andrea nearly dead in the woods as she traipsed through the forest wearing a hood, brandishing as sword with her boyfriend and his best friend tied up on chains with their jaws cut off as cover so she could wander past any pack of walkers about to go by. She’s come a long way since then and Michonne is just hoping Sasha can be saved before she become the same kind of person.

Before they head back, Sasha reveals the latest source of her latest trip into the woods to slaughter walkers and it goes beyond her grief for Bob and Tyreese. She’s feeling guilty because in the days leading up to the group making it to Alexandria, Sasha told Noah that he wouldn’t make it out here and now like clockwork, he’s dead.

Being right doesn’t always mean feeling good about it and Sasha is finding that out in a bad way right now.

Time Is a Flat Circle

Aaron and Daryl are out on a scouting mission to hopefully recruit some new people to become part of Alexandria although it’s not easy to find the living when the dead seem to be coming in greater numbers these days. In the distance after killing the latest stray that’s in their way, Daryl notices a fire burning and that means somebody is alive, but who?

The next day Aaron and Daryl walk through the woods, they find a scattered bunch of body parts from a walker that’s been torn apart. There are pieces of arms and legs left behind, but the torso is missing and other random body parts as well. Daryl knows this body is fresh and whoever did this just got finished and moved on.

They continue the hunt until they happen upon a woman tied to a tree with her inside ripped out. Replace Aaron and Daryl with Rust and Marty and pop a pair of antlers on the body and this is straight out of ‘True Detective’. Somebody either left her their to die as zombie bait or this was punishment and that’s how it was doled out. Either way, when Daryl investigates the woman comes alive so clearly she wasn’t dead when she was first tied to the tree, but she’s definitely not coming back again after he shoves a blade through her skull.

And once again on her forehead — as we saw on several other zombies this episode — was a carving of the letter ‘W’. Don’t forget back when we landed in Noah’s ‘hometown’ that there was a similar zombie left dismembered in the street with a number of body parts missing and that was the same place where we found the message ‘wolves not far’. This strengthens my belief that the people carving the ‘W’ into the zombie heads while apparently cutting up dead bodies and keeping some of the parts are a group from the comic books known as ‘The Scavengers’ and in the show it appears they will be called ‘The Wolves’. Only seems fitting that this will be one of the big reveals in the season finale next week. Let’s wait and see if I’m correct!

Fight or Die

Following last week’s episode where Carol revealed to Rick that Pete, the abusive husband and town surgeon, is hitting his wife Jessie, the new constable in town decides to make an impassioned plea to Alexandria’s leader about what has to be done. Every instinct inside of Rick is telling him to just kill Pete because in his mind that’s the only course of action.

His resolve is only strengthened after Carol tells him about the latest chat she shared with Sam when the boy revealed that his mother installed a lock on the inside of his closet and whenever daddy goes a little mad, that’s where he’s supposed to go to hide until the violence is over. One day recently while Sam was locked inside the closet, he heard Pete yelling at Jessie until everything went silent. The boy took that as a sign that he could leave the closet and check to see what happened. When he wandered out into the living room, Sam found his mother on the floor, unconscious and bleeding. Carol reminds Rick about her own experiences with this horrible situation when she was still married to Ed and she believes if not for the walkers who invaded their camp back near Atlanta, she would be dead because of it.

When Rick runs into Pete while doing his patrol later, he refuses to engage and instead tells him to just keep walking. Rick knows in his heart what he has to do, but he’s trying damn hard to play by Alexandria’s rules so he pays a visit to Deanna.

The problem is when Rick reveals what’s going on between Pete and Jessie behind closed doors, Deanna isn’t surprised at all and just responds that she ‘hoped it would stop’. See, Pete is the town’s only doctor and because he’s so necessary to Alexandria’s survival, Deanna and the others turned a blind eye while he brutally abused his wife.

When Rick suggests the only alternative to handle this problem is to kill Pete because otherwise he won’t stop, Deanna once again scoffs at the idea and says that this is a society and they don’t just kill people without a damn good reason. If anything, Deanna believes exile is the only punishment that they can hand out in these situations (which in a way is almost the same as killing somebody) but Rick notes that if they just send Pete out into the woods, who knows what he might do to get back in again and if he does, Jessie will probably be the person who pays for it.

Rick tries as best he can to turn Deanna to his way of thinking, but she’s not having any of it.

Rick decides to pay Jessie a visit when he reveals that he knows what Pete is doing and offers his help. Jessie says this has been a long standing problem with her husband and before the zombie apocalypse happened, he got help and got better, but lately as he’s been hitting the bottle harder and harder, things have just gotten worse. Jessie asks if Rick would do this for anybody else, and he answers honestly and says ‘no’. Jessie shuns Rick’s advances and offer of help at first, but when he insists that something has to be done regardless of his feelings for her because Sam recently asked Carol for a gun to protect his mom, she finally agrees.

Just then Pete walks in, sauced to the gills, and immediately notices Jessie and Rick are standing just a little too close to each other and he begins demanding to know what’s going on. When Jessie tells him to leave and Rick commands that they go together, Pete immediately shifts into rage mode. Rick and Pete get into an all out brawl that ends up with the two of them going through the living room window, cowboy style out into the street.

Each man gains an upper hand on the other and when Jessie tries to break it up, Pete shoves her aside. When Carl (apparently he made it back to town) tries to get Rick to stop, he gets shoved to the ground as well. Carol watches in the distance while holding Sam close. Finally, Rick gets the advantage he needs and he chokes Pete unconscious just as Deanna and the others from Alexandria arrive.

Deanna commands him to stop and Rick finally snaps and pulls out the gun he’s been hiding for the past few weeks. He points it directly at them and says that this fantasy world they are living it needs to dissipate before more people get killed. The idea of society and rules sound great until it costs lives and that’s exactly what Deanna is going to do if she keeps governing the way she’s been going lately. Rick’s rant puts everybody back on their heels and as his own blood mixes with Pete’s after a throw down in the middle of the street, he’s feeling more animalistic than ever before. The only way to survive is kill or be killed, fight or die.

Out of nowhere, Michonne cold cocks Rick and knocks him out to stop him from saying anything further. Rick has been walking a fine line for weeks trying to remember the man he used to be versus the survivor he’s become. What will happen to Rick now that one of his own people decided to take him down? What have Daryl and Aaron discovered in the woods surrounding Alexandria? And whatever happened to Carol’s tuna casserole?

We should find out answers to at least two of those three questions in ‘The Walking Dead’ season finale — a 90-minute season finale — next week starting at 9pm ET on AMC.

For those curious to hear the song from tonight’s episode – ‘Somewhat Damaged’ by Nine Inch Nails from the album ‘The Fragile’.