The Walking Dead: season six, episode two – JSS

An attack on Alexandria provides some beautiful carnage and a philosophical split on the future of the community

Spoiler alert: this blog is published after The Walking Dead airs on AMC in the US on Sundays. Do not read on unless you have watched season six, episode two (which airs in the UK on Fox on Mondays)

‘Just survive somehow’

Considering the horn that disrupted the zombie stampede at the end of last episode and the audience’s eagerness to discover the cause, it was a little odd to start the episode with the origin of Carl’s girlfriend, Enid.

She lost her parents in a zombie attack and then traveled around the woods sleeping in cars and eating raw turtle – can’t you get salmonella from that? – to survive. Everywhere she slept she put the initials “JSS”, I thought as a way to remind people that she was there. She even wrote them on her hand before entering the walls of Alexandria.

When the attack on the city happens, she’s about to run for the gates. But Carl convinces her to stay and keep Judith safe with him. However, after seeing Carl kill one of the Wolves, she takes off when he’s not paying attention and leaves a note behind.

“Just survive somehow,” is all she writes – it’s the mantra she’s been muttering to herself to keep going.

Enid feels Alexandria is too big to protect. They have too much and too many people will want to take it. She feels at her safest when she’s on her own and she knows she can take care of herself out in the wild. Also, it has to suck when your only teenage companions and possible suitors are the ever annoying Carl and the sniveling Ron. Neither of them are worth getting all emo over.

Her motto is the same as the show’s. That’s all everyone has been managing to do for seasons now, just surviving somehow, but what Enid doesn’t realize is that there should be more to living than survival.

That is the big philosophical debate that is at the center of the show – do we survive at any means necessary or are there bigger things worth fighting for? Can we create a world where other things – like morality, kindness, and compassion – can exist?

At the end of the episode, Spencer asks Rosita: “How do you keep living, knowing that’s what the world is like?” That’s the question everyone has to answer.

If this world isn’t worth living for, how do you change it into something that is?

‘They’re in the walls. They’re going to die. All of them’

After the weird Enid interlude and some introductory matters in Alexandria, the action starts, almost imperceptibly. What’s funny is that based on the egg timer that Carol sets for her casserole at the beginning of the episode, the action sort of unfurls in real time: a whole invasion lasting just about an hour.

We had a bit of foreshadowing last week, knowing a horn was going off from the camp. I figured it had to be either an attack by the Wolves or someone trying to sabotage Rick from his own HQ. Of course, it was the former, and the horn was from a dead big rig driver trying to barrel through the front gates. Luckily, he is killed and his body switches on the air horn as it falls.

Everyone in the community handles things differently. Many are just fodder for the Wolves, who hack and slash their way through a good number of the weaker members. As Rick says, they weren’t at all prepared to deal with any sort of serious threat, and if it weren’t for the people that Rick brought into the camp, the Wolves would have taken over the entire town and gotten their bloody paws on all of the guns in the armory.

Carol, the ultimate badass, was more than amply equipped to deal with it. She sort of only has one tactic, but it’s one that works very well: she disguises herself as a member of the other group and then destroys them from within. That’s what she did when she disguised herself as a zombie at Terminus, as a housewife in Alexandria, and as a Wolf during the invasion. My favorite moment was when she was running around the town, handing out guns willy nilly, waving them around from her treat bag as if they were Halloween candy.

Carl also has a healthy reaction, keeping his sister safe and helping whoever he can. He keeps Enid safe until she bolts and kills a Wolf who is trying to get Ron. However, Ron would not get to safety in Carl’s house because his dad is a big fat jerk.

Instead, stupid Ron goes back to his own house and alerts the woman who is casing the joint. His mother, Jessie, who wanted to teach him how to keep himself safe, has to leave her closet and confront the woman, eventually killing her with a pair of scissors. Jessie just keeps stabbing and stabbing until she can’t stop, taking out aggression pent up after years of dealing with an abusive husband and a moody teenage son.

Ron looks on in awe, either frightened at what his mother has become or finally realizing that he might have to toughen up a little bit if he wants to make it.

‘You don’t want to be a coward. I know’

Not everyone reacts as well as Carol and Carl. After shooting the truck driver from the church steeple, Spencer goes down to try to stop the air horn. He can’t do it and instead Morgan, arriving fresh from the zombie stampede, has to do it for him. Then Morgan asks if he’s coming to help and Spencer hesitates. He’s too timid and ill-prepared to last inside and decides to stay out of the fray. Eventually Maggie comes along with his mother, Deanna, and tasks Spencer with keeping her safe. Deanna also demurs from going outside, saying that the people need her alive.

She climbs into the cab of the truck and Tovah Feldshuh’s face, in one solid shot, performs one of the most amazing feats of acting I’ve ever seen in my life. First she looks terrified of the attack and tries to close her eyes and ignore the sounds of death and suffering coming from inside. Then she opens her eyes. She’s decided this is the last time she is going to hide behind those walls while the world is ravaged around her. She opens her eyes to take it all in and her face shifts. She wants herself to suffer, to know she is responsible for every death. Almost imperceptibly, her face hardens and all her fear is finally gone.

Eugene, the biggest coward of them all, tells Denise, the new doctor (played by Emmy winner and world-class thespian Merritt Wever) she has to try to save Holly, who is bleeding internally. He knows what happens when you live your life based on fear, and she tries her best but fails, eventually asking everyone to leave. She’s going to have some role to play in the near future (Eugene’s love interest?) and I’m excited to see what it’s going to be.

‘If you’re choosing this life, you’re going to die’

While the invasion provided all of the action for this episode, the biggest conflict was actually between Carol and Morgan.

Carol thinks they need to kill all of the Wolves in order to stay safe and Morgan tells her they don’t need to kill anyone. Carol doesn’t really pay attention, shooting one of the Wolves after Morgan has bound his hands and held him captive.

I’m sort of with Carol on this one. If people showed up and were trying to kill me and take the little bit of peace I had fought hard for, I would kill them too. What good is beating them with a stick and then binding their hands going to do? Is there even a prison cell big enough in Alexandria for a dozen attackers?

But Morgan does have a point. What is the use of creating a society like Alexandria if they’re only going to protect it with bloodshed and violence? Isn’t that going against the general notion we have of society? But it seems like a philosophy even Morgan can’t truly stand behind. When he finds a man lurking in a house after the attack, the man notices Morgan can’t kill and says that he should have. He can’t be scared off like the others before him. He won’t stop attacking. Morgan has to kill him. He apologizes before he finally destroys his skull with his stick.

Carol has a revelation of her own, wondering why she killed the mean smoking housewife when she was making so much noise, something that Rick did to Carter in the previous episode.

“You’re not like him,” Morgan told her earlier, but she’s starting to question it. She sits on the front stairs and cries, trying to rub the W off of her head. Has she become just like the Wolves in trying to protect herself? Has she been posing as the enemy too long and doesn’t know who she is anymore? Is she, in fact, too hard?

No matter their later revelations, when Carol and Morgan pass each other, they don’t even speak to each other. It seems there is no middle ground in their approach to this new world.

But there are greater questions about Alexandria. As Rosita says at the end of the episode, she’s not sure if this place and these people are worth dying for. Morgan let several of the Wolves get away, including one who scooped up a gun. We’re sure they’re going to come back and they’ll bring others. I wonder if Morgan is going to find himself on the other side of that gun sometime in the near future.

The Wolf Carol killed said: “A trap. You need to know. People don’t belong here anymore.”

Is this just the prelude to something worse?

Dead Ends

• Does Carl have the worst Justin Bieber-esque hair helmet on the face of the entire planet? He’d look better if he took a machete to that mop. Now that he lives next door to Alexandria’s barbershop, can’t he at least go and get the back and sides cleaned up? Once the invasion is all over, Ethan finds his backpack with his pictures of the homes and walls on one of the Wolves’ bodies. This is all his fault, he thinks, his hands covered in blood.
  

• Speaking of blood, didn’t some of the carnage look absolutely amazing, with the shining red dripping down the stairs? If only they could manage to make it into works of art like Hannibal always did.
  

• My favorite part of the episode is when Carl takes the casserole out of the oven. We certainly don’t want that to burn!
  

• One thing I didn’t understand was the A that Carol sees painted in red on the bannister. Is that the house with the armory? Did the Wolves paint that so they’ll know where it is to come back? That must be it, right?
  

• What is going on with the zombie stampede? Did everyone just save themselves from the living just in time to be attacked by the dead? God, I’m so glad I don’t live in the zombie apocalypse.
  

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