Month: February 2021

Triggerfinger starts with Lori, unconscious and hurt after her car rolled over. A walker is doing its best to get to her. She looks like an easy late night snack. At least until she wakes up starts to fight.

Rick, Glen, and Hershel are hiding in the bar where they were last seen at the end of Episode 8. More newcomers show up, looking for their friends, who Rick just put down last episode.

Rick tries to defuse the situation, but the newcomers shoot out the windows in reply. Rick’s plan is to have Glen run for the car as Hershel covers him, and Rick holds the front entrance. We then get to see that Hershel may not like guns, but he does know how to use one. Glen is not dealing with the stress well and has frozen, but luckily for him the newcomers flee. They don’t know how many people are in the bar. But they do know they’ve already lost at least three of their own. Unfortunately for one of the newcomers, his buddies leave him behind when they flee. He jumps down off the roof and ends up speared on a cast iron fence.

This is one of those scenes that I just don’t get. This guy, or kid as Rick puts it, just tried to shoot them from a roof. Put a bullet in the kid’s head and get back to the farm! Instead, Rick convinces Hershel to amputate the leg. This leads to them being surrounded before Rick eventually just rips the dude’s leg up off the spike.

Out on the road Shane finds Lori, and lies to her that Rick has returned to the farm to get her into the car. When they show up Shane drops the pregnancy news publicly. Now Carl and everyone else knows. When Shane get’s her alone she tells him that Rick knows, that she told her husband what happened. Shane tries to convince her it was “okay”, that what they did was a good thing, but Lori isn’t buying it. If only she’d been so strong a week after she thought her husband was dead.

We then see a horribly emotional scene between Daryl and Carol as she tries to let him know he’s part of their group. He rages at her, saying horrible and cruel things. She just takes it, knowing he needs to vent. DId her previous life of abuse giving her the ability to take it? It’s sad, but also sweet that she cares enough about Daryl to take his pain.

With Rick, Hershel, and Glen missing, Shane, Daryl, and Andrea are about to go on a search mission. As soon as Maggie sees Glen she runs to him, bypassing her dead in a sad snub.

Once inside Maggie pulls Glen aside and he tells her that her dad saved him, and then Rick saved them all, but that he froze. He froze because he was scared of losing her, and now he feels guilty.

Triggerfinger ends with Lori telling Rick that Shane believes her baby is his (it probably is) and that Shane is telling others that Rick is going to get them all killed with his bad decisions.

Triggerfinger Scoring

I’m giving Triggerfinger a 76/100, making it Worth Your Time. There isn’t a lot of Zombie action, which cost it some points.

Pretty Much Dead Already opens with tension. Rick and Lori are dealing with the fallout of her unable to keep her legs closed for Shane, while Glen keeps looking over at Maggie who is standing on the porch. He’s decided he doesn’t have a choice, to keep the secret any longer, and drops the bomb on Team Rick that the barn is full of walkers.

The barn full of walker ignites the group. Shane wants to leave while Rick and Daryl want to stay and find Sophia.

With the secret out Glen begs Maggie to talk, but she just breaks an egg over his head, not ready to make nice. While Maggie is taking her anger out on Glen, Daryl is stubbornly trying to go back out, wounded, to search for Sophia. When Carol stops him, he loses it.

As everyone is dealing with their sh*t, Rick goes to talk to Hershel.

Rick wants to talk about the barn. Hershel just tells Rick he wants his group to move on by the end of the week. He doesn’t want to talk about the barn. Rick tells Hershel that forcing them to leave would mean putting everyone at risk, including his pregnant wife. Hershel doesn’t want to hear it.

A little later Hershel tells Maggie that he gave Rick the order to leave, and Maggie uses his faith to show him what the bible would have said. Hershel struggles with what Maggie is saying but he gets pulled away when he’s told “its happened again”.

Hershel bring Rick with him to the creek. The bottom of the stream is soft and silty, and walkers get stuck there. Maggie must have an impact on Hershel, even though they didn’t really finish their conversation. Hershel asks Rick if he can stop killing the walkers.

Rick asks Hershel what they are going to do when the Barn gets full but Hershel doesn’t answer as they wrangle the two Zombies away from the stream.

Back at the farm Glen confronts Maggie, telling her he never wants to see her in danger again, and the words made Maggie realize he does really care about her – and smooching commenced.

While Maggie and Glen are making up, Dale and Shane are having it out. Shane wants the guns that Dale is trying to stash, and it almost comes to blows.

Shane is pissed, and that anger overflows onto rick and Hershel when he sees them coming back with the two restrained Zombies. This leads to Shane screaming about how a sick person couldn’t take multiple gunshot wounds to the chest – before he finally puts the walker down with a headshot.

It’s still not enough for Shane though, and he lets loose the barn zombies in a fit of rage, which leads to one of the iconic moments of The Walking Dead universe. After the team puts down the other zombies, the last walker out the gate is revealed. The team has found Sophia.

Pretty Much Dead Already Scoring

Pretty Much Dead Already is one of those episodes that you will remember for years to come. I still remember this episode when it was on the air the first time. I remember sitting on the couch with my older boys, and we all gasped when we saw Sophia. Pretty Much Dead Already scores a 100/100. It is a master class in suspense and character development.

After how Chupacabra ended with Glen finding the walkers in Hershel’s barn, I guess Secrets is the perfect name for Episode 6.

Secrets opens with Carl back on his feet, feeding the chickens with Lori. Which leads to one of Hershel’s daughters collecting some of those chickens to feed to the walkers in the barn.

Which leads to Maggie bribing Glen to be quiet. Apparently she doesn’t know how to bribe a guy? Food?

After Maggie gives Glen his basket of food, we get to see Andrea apologize to Daryl for winging him with a rifle. Daryl is cool with it though, he knows she thought he was a Zombie. Such a good guy.

Glen then gets into Lori’s business in an unwelcome way, telling her she has a medical condition because she’s preggo. Needless to say Lori hasn’t told anyone, and Glenn doesn’t understand why it might be an issue because he doesn’t know she’s a few weeks in – a few weeks longer than Rick has been back maybe?

We then get one of those silly moments. Carl wants to learn to shoot, and Lori is against it. It’s the Zombie Apocalypse for god’s sake, give your kid the tools to survive woman!!!

Glen then does exactly what Maggie asked him not to do, and tells Dale about the walkers, and about Lori’s pregnancy. Dale covers for Glen and tells Hershel he discovered the barn while out for a walk.

We then get our second dose of silliness in the season. Hershel is keeping the walkers because he believes they are still people. His wife and stepson are in there.

While talking to Hershel Lori finds out that the invitation to stay on the farm has an expiration date, and then realizes that her secret is out when Dale tries to comfort her after she gets nauseous when he’s cooking. Lori is not happy to have her secret out, which leads Lori to ask Glen to make another pharmacy run.

This in turn shows us Maggie’s mad face.

She is pissed, and her attitude doesn’t get much better when Glen hands her his shopping list. He might not know what the meds are, but I think she does.

Unfortunately for Maggie, there is a walker in the pharmacy. Luckily for her Glen is there to take care of business, which also exposes her to just how dangerous walkers are.

While saving Maggie may have put Glen back in her Maggie’s good graces, Maggie is still pissed, she’s just mad at Lori now for making Glen go into town for the morning after pill. This also leads to Maggie telling Glen that she does see who he is, and that she does care for him, she just can’t bear the thought of losing anyone else she cares about.

We then cut over to Shane and Andrea making a run into a nearby housing development to look for Sophia, but all they find is a neighborhood full of walkers. This leads to Shane showing off his shooting skills:

While also giving Andrea the moment she needs to find her shooting mojo against walker targets. Shane forces her to clear her weapon and take care of the walker coming at her, which does seem to help her.

Andrea in turn thanks Shane for teaching her by grabbing his crotch on the way back to the farm. The camera pulls back to the car stopped on the road. We hear a horn and then cut away as Shane and Andrea get busy.

Back at the farm, Lori decides to take the morning after pill, then sticks her finger down her throat, unable to do it.

Dale is there when Shane comes back with Andrea, and he is very perceptive. He knows that something happened between Shane and Andrea and Dale basically tells Shane to get in his car and leave. Dale saw Shane aim at Rick in the woods, and he doesn’t trust him. Dale shares a bit too much with Shane though, and gets threatened in return.

Back in the Grimes tent Rick finds the morning after pill which leads him to go and confront Lori. She tells him she’s pregnant, and he asks if she still is, and she admits to puking up the pills. Rick is pissed that she was keeping it secret, but he is also convinced they can make it work.

This leads to Rick asking Lori if there is anything else he needs to know, and Lori admits that she and Shane were bang buddies. Of course she puts it in less graphic terms.

Rick takes this way to well in my opinion. He basically puts words in her mouth about how she thought he was dead. Am I just nuts or would he be a little more pissed – especially since she’s preggo? Can he be sure its his? He couldn’t have survived for long on that hospital bed with no care, which means she had to jump into the sack with Shane pretty quick – and or was already in the sack with Shane. Shane is a ladies man, he was even banging a teacher in highs chool, and Rick and Lori were having issues. Is it so hard to believe they were playing tag long before the apocalypse?

I’m giving Secrets an 85/100. The points are coming off because of the silly, counter intuitive logic used in several of the situations. Still Worth Your Time, but there are times when Secrets left me scratching my head.

Carl’s Questionable Decisions

• Season 2, Episode 1, What Lies Ahead (29:15) – Carl scavenges a bag of edged weapons from a car without any adult supervision. Sure it turned out to be someone who was dead dead, but he had no idea.
• Season 2, Episode 6, Secrets(7:45) – Carl gets caught with a revolver he stole from the RV. I get the motivation, but he should have asked first.
• Season 2, Episode 11, Judge, Jury, Executioner(10:35) – Carl decides he should approach the prisoner in the barn and chat with him.
• Season 2, Episode 11, Judge, Jury, Executioner(19:35) – Carl steels a 45 from Daryl’s motorcycle. Haven’t we been down this gun path before?