On the plus side, they found Sophia...

"Pretty Much Dead Already"

[Spoilers]

Glenn's announcement, "So...guys; barn's full of walkers" besides being deadpan, and totally brilliant sends the group into a tailspin. It polarizes around the two leaders: Scary Shane and Sheriff Rick. Glenn and Maggie get even more character development (yay!), Shane learns that Lori is pregnant (yikes!), and when the barn spills its final secrets, we realize: Hershel is a dick. Seriously.

Knowing that Hershel is keeping walkers in the barn, waiting for a cure, affects the group in different ways. Team Shane wants to leave immediately for Fort Benning, which means they should find Sophia so that this is even an option. Daryl tries to set off immediately, even though he's still recovering from his last escapade; when Sophia's mom tries to stop him he calls her a bitch. Excellent taste in men, Sophia's mom.

Dale warns Andrea that she doesn't know what Shane is and she responds, "He's not a victim." True dat, but check the implications of that as well. Dale takes the entire arsenal of guns and heads out to the swamp to hide them from Shane.

Glenn finally explains to Maggie why he told the group about the barn: walkers are dangerous, and he'd rather have Maggie alive and pissed off with him, instead of happy with him and dead. Cue kissing. Yay.

Rick tries to talk Hershel into letting them stay on the farm, mainly because Lori is pregnant, and they need a safe haven where the cries of a newborn infant won't automatically put the entire group at risk. Hershel puts Rick to the test: help Hershel and his farm hand herd two walkers into the barn instead of following his instinct and shooting them in the face.

Finding out that Lori is pregnant sends Shane to his crazy place - visibly shaken, he heads out to get those guns back from Dale. But not before totally freaking Lori out in a conversation where he says that Rick isn't going to survive in this new world, he doesn't have the skills: but Shane does.

Shane finds Dale out hiding the guns in the swamp and calls his bluff when Dale threatens to shoot him. Seriously, nobody was buying it. He takes the guns back and hands them out to the group, just in time to spot Rick and Hershel herding the two new walkers toward the barn. Shane shouts, "Enough!" and demonstrates to Hershel in the most brutal way possible that walkers are no longer 'alive.' (Note: why didn't they TELL Hershel what they learned in the CDC, about how the entire body dies, and only the base of the brain comes back? He's had medical training, he might understand it.) Anyway, Shane freaks out and breaks open the lock on the barn door. He, Andrea, Daryl, and T-Dog step forward and shoot the walkers as they emerge, one by one; with everyone looking on in horror. Glenn joins, but checks with Maggie first that it's okay with her. Because even though the walkers are bad, it's still a massacre, and it's awful. Finally, only one is left and just as you start to think that no, they wouldn't...yup, they would. The last walker in the barn is Sophia.

And it's Rick, purportedly the one who isn't built for this new world, who steps forward and shoots Sophia, while everyone else hides and cries.

And all I can think is that Hershel is a dick: he knew it was Sophia in the barn. He had to know! They're looking for a missing 11-year old girl, and he has a brand-new 11-year old walker. But he let them go on looking for her and hoping she was okay. Something bad is going to happen to Hershel, and I am totally okay with that.

So the show is on a mid-season break now, until February. But we already got one more episode this season than we did for all of season 1, so I'm going to take the February - March episodes as a nice bonus, rather than be angry at the mid-season break. With all its faults, The Walking Dead is still my favorite show...until Breaking Bad comes back.

See also:

The Walking Dead S2E6 review

9 ways to keep us watching The Walking Dead

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