Recap: The Walking Dead Season 2, Episode 5: “Chupacabra”

Previously: Sophia ran off, Rick talked about finding her, Darryl actually looks for her but finds only flowers, Lori wants a pregnancy test, Maggie and Glenn get it on, Lori gets her pregnancy test and it’s POSITIVE.

A backed up roadway, full of cars and people and car horns blaring. Flashback? Shane is scanning the radio bands. Sophia and Carl play checkers, sitting on a tailgate. Helicopters are heard. Sophia’s Angry Abusive Dad (AAD) is there, too, so definitely flashback, because he’s dead from zombie now. Sophia asks if they can go soon. Carl is hungry, Lori says they all are. Carol says AAD is a survivalist, so they have tons of MREs (Meals Ready to Eat, per the US Armed Forces). She goes to get one for Carl, but AAD is not OK with this, or even with Carol mentioning the MREs, because now everyone knows they have them! AAD goes on about “operational security” and Carol folds like a card table.

Lori asks Shane if there’s any joy on the radio. Shane says the emergency broadcast has stopped, but he wants to go up the road a bit to see if someone up there knows anything. Lori, for some reason, wants to go with him. Carol makes an excuse about the MREs and offers a granola bar or something, but Lori is over it already and asks her to instead “keep an eye” on Carl while she goes with Shane.

As they walk, Lori asks why they would’ve stopped broadcasting about the refugee centre (which, you will recall, was supposed to be in Atlanta, which is where all the cars on this particular road are headed).

Sophia tells Carl his “dad” is nice. Carl explains Shane isn’t his dad, and that his dad’s dead. (Actually, comatose in an abandoned hospital, but there’s a lot these characters don’t know at this point.) There’s an explosion in the distance. A fight breaks out at a nearby car. Helicopters fly overhead toward the city. Lori and Shane walk to get a better view, and what they see is huge explosions blanketing Atlanta. “They’re dropping napalm in the streets,” Shane says. He embraces Lori while she weeps.

Opening credits.

Lori is waking up in a tent. She fumbles for the bedside clock. Turns out we’re back in present day, at Hershel’s farm, and Lori has overslept. Carol, hanging laundry on the line, says she must have needed it. Carol floats the idea that they use the farmhouse kitchen to cook dinner for Hershel’s family tonight. Carol wants Lori to do the asking, because she’s Rick’s wife and that makes her their “unofficial first lady.” Clearly Lori thinks this statement is as ridiculous as I do.

Rick is once again holding court over the hood of the truck, talking about the day’s Search for Sophia plans. A very pale young man we’ve never seen before approaches and asks to help. One of Herschel’s kids? Rick asks if Hershel approves and Pale Young Man says he does. Darryl talks about “borrowing” a horse and looking up the creek. T-Dawg bugs Darryl about a chupacabra, which apparently Darryl said he saw while hunting once.

Glenn sits on the porch, staring into the distance and strumming tunelessly on a guitar. Maggie appears, Turns out Darryl found the guitar on the highway. Glenn mentions that they still have eleven condoms. Maggie says that’s eleven minutes of her life she’s never getting back. This dig doesn’t stop Glenn from doing his best Casanova impression, which Maggie doesn’t seem to buy at the moment.

Shane, Rick and their rifles are searching the forest. They banter about their sexual histories  in a way that recalls the camaraderie they had in the first episode. Also, it turns out Shane slept with married women in high school. Old habits die hard? Then the conversation turns to the validity of the search itself. Basically, Shane doesn’t think it’s worth it to keep looking for Sophia. The argument is brought to an end when they find a blue flag nailed to a tree, indicating they’ve found their way into Andrea and T-Dawg’s search grid.

Darryl shoots a squirrel with an arrow. He’s riding a horse at the top of a ravine when he spots a doll lying in the muddy creek bed. He dismounts and heads down to fetch it. He picks up the doll and calls for Sophia, then returns to his horse. He’s sauntering along when the horse gets spooked by a rather large snake, throwing Darryl  not just to the ground but to the bottom of the ravine. Ouch. Ouchier still is that the fall has caused one of the arrows in his quiver to impale him through the side in what is probably a nonlethal but incredibly painful injury.

Commercial.

I can’t quite figure out what Darryl’s doing — he doesn’t take the arrow out, but he rips off his shirt sleeve and makes it into a rope to kind of tie around his waist like a belt and tie the arrow to the belt as well? I guess to stabilize the arrow so it’s not moving around while he attempts to climb out of the ravine? Not sure. Anyway, Darryl still has to climb out of the ravine and it looks a lot higher than it did when he fell down it. He picks up a branch to use as a walking stick, and hears a rustling in the nearby bushes. He realizes he doesn’t have his crossbow anymore, so he wades out into the water to find it. You know, climbing out of ravines is really low on my list of enjoyable activities — somewhere between tooth extraction and eating pickled herring — and even less so if I had to do it while impaled with an arrow, so I really feel for Darryl in this scene. He’s got the found doll tucked into his belt, by the way.

Back at the farm. Glenn hounds Lori about the pregnancy test, and realizes that Lori hasn’t told “him” (presumably he means Rick) yet. Rick and Shane are back, and Rick tells Lori that Shane wants to call off the search. Lori reassures Rick that he is making the best decisions he can and that he’s not “soft.” A blonde tweenage girl interrupts and says her dad wants to talk to Rick.

Back to Darryl climbing. He’s trash-talking himself for motivation. And then he falls, again.

Rick finds Hershel working on an engine (generator?) of some kind. Hershel asks about his missing horse. He also asks about Pale Young Man, who we learn is named Jimmy. Turns out Hershel did not give Jimmy permission to go searching for Sophia, and that Jimmy is not his son but is “kin,” so that means Hershel is in charge of him. Hershel reiterates that he wants to control his people, and Rick control his. Thus endeth the meeting of the patriarchs.

Darryl is unconscious back at the bottom of the ravine. A figure approaches him. It’s Merle! I’m gonna go ahead and assume this is an hallucination. Hallucination Merle starts right in on name-calling and hassling Darryl about his situation, asking him why Darryl is going to die here in the dirt. Darryl says it’s for a lost little girl. Merle makes a pedophilia joke and notes that Darryl stopped looking for him. Merle wants to know why Darryl is hanging out with Rick, the guy who, from Merle’s perspective, forced him to cut off his own hand (we then see the hand, still attached to Merle, so we know for sure it’s an hallucination). Merle accuses Darryl of “playing errand boy for a bunch of pansy-asses, n****rs and democrats.” (Sidebar on AMC Standards and Practices: they’ll let the N-word fly, but not the F-word, not even once. I find that weird and incongruous.) Hallucination Merle goes on about how Darryl isn’t really part of the Rick group and they’re going to ditch him eventually and then he asks Darryl go shoot Rick in the face. Merle says no one but him will ever really care about Darryl. Hm. There are abusive overtones to this relationship that go beyond sibling-to-sibling toughness. Maybe this is why Darryl is so invested in helping Sophia and Carol? Because he relates to their being abused by a loved one?

Darryl is roused from his hallucination by a zombie gnawing on him (presumably just his boot, that’s a pretty stupid zombie even by zombie standards). While Darryl fights and kills the zombie, another one approaches, and Darryl pulls the arrow out of his own body to shoot the second zombie. Badass.

Commercial.

Darryl regains consciousness. Now he has a gaping wound in his side; he ties his shirt around his waist as a bandage. He cleans off his knife and guts and eats the squirrel he killed earlier. No, he does not bother to cook the squirrel. He makes sure to tuck the found dolly back into his belt. He cuts the ears off the dead zombies and makes them into a necklace. Not kidding.  So, to recap: Darryl is filthy, wearing a necklace of zombie ears, and has blood from the squirrel caked around his mouth. He resumes his ascent out of the ravine. The Merle hallucination reappears, and his taunts continue, including a reference to the chupacabra. Fortunately, the taunts give Darryl the push he needs to get to the top. Gotta hand it to Darryl’s subconscious for giving him an hallucination that was actually useful in the circumstances.

Hershel walks into the farmhouse kitchen and finds the ladies cooking. He asks Maggie what the deal is. Maggie explains that Lori and Carol are cooking dinner for everyone as a thank you. Naturally, Hershel is not pleased by this. But Hershel has a more pressing concern with Maggie, and that’s whatever’s going on between her and “the Asian boy.” The gist of the conversation, though, seems to be less that Hershel is worried about Maggie and Glenn knocking boots (it’s fair to say he has no idea about that) but that he wants to remind Maggie that Rick & Co. will not be staying forever, so there’s no point making friends.

Dale approaches the RV to find Andrea on top of it, wearing a cowboy hat and holding a rifle (I guess Shane gave her a gun after all?). He makes a crack about her “Annie Oakley routine” and Andrea is rightfully annoyed, saying she doesn’t want to do laundry anymore, she wants to guard the camp. (I was pretty pumped to see Andrea with a rifle in hand, as I imagine most fans of the comic were.) Dale is still on Andrea’s shitlist. Dale goes into the RV to find Glenn, who’s returning a book. He apologizes for returning it late, and Dale apologizes for bringing lousy books to the apocalypse. Glenn has other things on his mind, though. Like menstrual cycles. He broaches the subject that women’s cycles match up when they live together, and is that why all the women are acting weird? To his credit, Dale realizes that this line of questioning is less about all the women and more about one particular woman. Glenn is confused by Maggie’s mixed signals, and apparently he’s also confused about Lori, though I don’t see much for him to be confused about there. Dale is not pleased by the information that Glenn had sex with Maggie, the daughter of their persnickety host. His exact words: “What were you thinking?!” Glenn was thinking he might be dead tomorrow.

Andrea spots a walker from her RV perch. She thinks she can get it with her rifle; the guys are all gathering weapons, and Rick protests, saying that Hershel wants to “deal with walkers.” Shane (whose shirt, if I’m not mistaken, has been completely unbuttoned for this entire episode) wants to handle it himself. Rick, Shane, T-Dawg and Glenn all run out into the field towards the zombie. Andrea sets her rifle sights.

But wait! Closeup on the walker and it’s not a zombie, it’s Darryl. To be fair, he definitely looks like a zombie and is walking like one due to his injury. No one can tell this yet, though. In fact,  even when the guys get within ten feet of Darryl, they don’t know he’s not a zombie until he speaks. A shot rings out, and Andrea is pleased with herself for hitting her target, at least until she hears the shouts of “NO!” coming from the field.

Commercial.

Everyone comes running out at the sound of the shot. Good news: Andrea just grazed Darryl, but he loses consciousness. Glenn points out the ear necklace, and Rick stashes it. T-Dawg picks up the doll, and asks, “Isn’t this Sophia’s?” Going back to the previouslies, I can confirm that yes, Sophia was carrying that doll when she dashed into the woods. Hm.

At the farmhouse, Darryl is awake and Hershel is stitching him up. Hershel complains about going through the antibiotics so quickly. He asks about the horse Darryl “borrowed,” and when he hears the story of the spooking, says that he would’ve mentioned that that particular horse was known as “Nervous Nellie”, had Darryl asked.  Touché. But like there’s any chance Hershel would’ve willingly lent him the horse.

Rick reports to a waiting Lori that Darryl will be OK. Shane (having buttoned his shirt up to his navel, at least) says that it’s time to call off the search. Rick points out that Darryl brought back hard evidence. Rick leaves Shane to continue his pitch to Lori. Lori says she doesn’t always agree with her husband, but she respects him. Way to submit to your husband’s leadership, lady — Michelle Bachman would be proud. Shane says all he cares about in the world is Lori and Carl. Uh-oh.

Andrea sits on the farmhouse porch steps. Dale emerges to report that Darryl will be fine. Andrea feels guilty. Dale says they’ve all wanted to shoot him. This gets a chuckle. Fences mended? We’ll see.

Lori is crying at Carl’s bedside, mumbling something about “baby, what do I do?” Which baby is she asking? Neither of them will be any help. In fact, Lori is rather choiceless in this circumstance. Unless they can loot some RU-46, or unless someone in their party knows how to induce miscarriage, Lori will be carrying this pregnancy to its conclusion. Carol pops in to call Lori to dinner.

Everyone is eating in silence in the dining room. Glenn breaks the ice by asking if anyone knows how to play guitar. This serves to make things more awkward, because the only person who knew how to play was Otis. Maggie, sitting next to Glenn at the kids’ table, passes him a note asking where they can hook up tonight. Glenn writes down his answer, but not before Hershel notices.

Carol brings a tray in for the convalescing Darryl. She doesn’t put the food anywhere he can reach it or anything, but it’s a nice gesture. Then, she leans over and kisses him on the forehead. He mumbles something about his stitches. She turns to leave, and then says, “You did more for my little girl in a day than her own daddy ever did in his whole life.” Darryl replies that he did what Rick or Shane would’ve done. Carol agrees, and says that he’s “every bit as good as them.” Au contraire, lady — he’s better. He’s more useful than Rick and less psychotic (hallucinations notwithstanding) than Shane. But that’s a discussion for another time.

Dinner’s over, and Maggie is just now getting around to reading Glenn’s reply to her booty call. He picked the loft of the barn. Which, given the information he currently has is actually a good spot for a secret tryst. But he does not have all the information, something we can tell from the look on Maggie’s face.

Glenn approaches the barn and finds it locked. Flashlight and blanket in hand, he goes around back to climb up into the loft. Maggie is desperately running to the barn. Up in the loft, Glenn notices a bad smell. Then he looks down to the floor of the barn. Which is full of at least a dozen zombies. Maggie arrives, too late, and says, “You weren’t supposed to see this.”