‘The Walking Dead’ Season 4 Episode 9 ‘After’ Recap: ‘Didn’t Get Me’

Carl is determined to be a man and he’s going to prove it no matter the cost and Michonne tries to find her friends and the piece of her soul that was lost when the zombie apocalypse first started…

By Damon Martin — Editor/Lead Writer

There are going to be two vastly different opinions of ‘The Walking Dead’s‘ return episode from Sunday night titled ‘After’. One group of critics will applaud the daring direction and solitary feeling executed by isolating out Rick and Carl battling with each other while Michonne walks her own path back to sanity. The other half (of which I’m included) will see The Walking Dead’s return as a paltry and sad excuse for a follow up to what I considered to be the crowning achievement of the series with the mid-season finale back in December.

The problems with The Walking Dead through three and a half seasons has really circled around one major issue — inconsistency. Now I’m not one of the people that were watching season two while the survivors were living on the farm while simultaneously screaming at my television that I needed more zombie deaths. Actually, for the most part season two was a well done series of episodes that led to an explosive finale and the Rick-tatorship (which never really came in case you were keeping score at home).

The new episode on Sunday night was a start over of sorts and there were elements done extremely well and I’ll get to those in a moment, but spending the better part of 35 minutes as Carl went through all the stages of puberty and teenage-dom was tedious and felt unnecessary. Be that as it may let’s course through the story that did take place (although there wasn’t much).

Rick’s In a Bad Way

Rick’s beatdown courtesy of The Governor messed him up something fierce. His eye is closed shut, his mouth is a mess and he’s bruised and beaten from head to toe. He can barely keep up with Carl, who is now walking faster and faster, blazing a solid path ahead of his father. Rick tries to keep Carl in line, but his son wants nothing to do with his leadership any longer after he failed to keep the group safe back at the prison while also losing his baby sister Judith.

Eventually after some scavenging at a local barbecue joint, Rick and Carl find a house to hold up in and grab some sleep for the night. In the morning, Rick is dead to the world on the couch and he’s not waking up. That’s when Carl decides to unload all of his teen angst on his unconscious father as he blames him for the deaths of his mother and Judith as well as everyone at the prison because he was too busy planting vegetables instead of getting them ready for war. Not to mention Rick stayed at the prison knowing The Governor was still out there and capable of coming back for revenge. Carl’s speech spirals into his declaration that he could survive in this world just fine by himself and he wishes Rick was dead.

Carl’s tirade gets cut short because there are walkers at the door and they are looking for a snack. Carl escapes out of the back to take care of the walkers by luring them out into the woods away from the house so he can shoot them without drawing more to their location. Rick warned Carl early in the episode about sparing bullets, but do you think his son listens? He might as well have told him not to drink beers or have sex because you know all teenagers are totally going to listen to that!

Carl gets the zombies away from the door just fine but then another springs out and surprises him and he has to waste about six or seven bullets to finally put them down. From there instead of going back to check on his unconscious father, Carl wanders out into the town to look for more supplies. He finds another house, innocent looking enough, and he goes inside and finds the mother load. Canned corn, beans and the prize of all prizes — a giant Costco sized can of chocolate pudding.

Instead of grabbing the food and running for it, Carl instead decides to look around the house where he runs into another walker hiding in a closet (good jumpy moment when this zombie pops out I must admit). Carl struggles to fight the zombie off and he fires off his last couple of bullets but misses the kill shot. It looks as if he’s about to meet his doom when he slips off his shoe and escapes out of a door, trapping the walker inside. On the door, Carl writes his masterpiece as a note to anyone else who happens by.

“Walker inside. Got my shoe. Didn’t get me” ~ Carl

Before he heads back to the house to check on his dad, Carl proceeds to eat 120 ounces of pudding while the walker he locked away sticks his arm out of a window and attempts to get at him, but fails miserably.

Michonne’s Memories

Michonne is the only other character we see this week, and while she’s been painfully underused thus far in the series, it seemed as if there was still some room to catch up with Daryl and Glenn and Maggie and the other 20 people that didn’t appear in this episode.

Regardless, the Michonne story was the highlight of this hour as she literally started over again by lopping up a couple of zombies to use as walker pets to help her navigate the fields of the dead all wandering towards a now burning prison. She also puts a final sword strike into zombie Hershel’s head as we say goodbye one last time to him. It’s here that we finally see some backstory to Michonne.

She was a mother with a small infant baby when the zombie apocalypse broke out, but her baby and her boyfriend (along with his friend) didn’t make it. Those two were her walkers when she first appeared during season 3 to help save Andrea. Michonne’s flashback gives us some insight into why she cried when she first held baby Judith and gives a little piece of humanity to what we’ve only known as a savage killing machine thus far.

Michonne eventually stumbles upon Rick and Carl’s trail and even finds the big ass can of pudding, although it’s empty now. She finally finds the house where her former prison mates are hold up, and as she spots Rick and Carl through the window, she breaks down in tears of joy. Michonne started this apocalyptic adventure with a family, lost them and was forced to live a lonely life of solitude, but she’s come full circle now. She has the family she missed and longed for, but never had a way to express it before now.

She knocks on the door, startling Rick and Carl. Rick, with his one good eye, peeps through the door to see who is knocking and as he sits down and has a laugh he tells Carl ‘it’s for you’.

Epilogue:

There were certainly a few bright spots in the episode and it was fruitful to see Michonne find some depth while we saw Carl morph from boy to man back to boy again, but the amount of time spent on these stories while we still had no clue what happened to the rest of the group seemed drawn out. At the end of season two when the group was separated after the farm was overrun by zombies, they found their way back to each other in pretty quick order. Maybe that’s what the show runners were determined to avoid the second time the survivors were split up, and they want to take their time bringing them back together, but it seems like the direction of the show lost a step this episode.

The mid-season finale was a tour de force, and not every episode can come close to what the hour of The Walking Dead represented, nor should it. What we can ask for, however, is for the story to move along in a fashion that showcases where this group is headed. Right now they are splintered and broken apart from one another and from the looks of things, the next episode will be spent following Daryl, Glenn, Maggie, Tyrese and the rest of the group as we catch up to see where they headed after the prison fell while we await a third hour to finally let us in on how all of them will start to find their way back to each other.

‘After’ was a disappointment in terms of story telling and direction, but in the longer form tale that we’re working towards, maybe this will fit like a puzzle piece in the big picture. Right now the episode appears as an elongated look into teen angst, psychosis and a story that needed 15 minutes to develop instead of sixty.