Glenn lives! While the season one survivor's apparent death had us fooled in “Thank You”, it's looked increasingly flaky with each passing week. When the show deliberately avoided acknowledging it in “Here's Not Here” and then took time out to dick about with the Alexandrians in “Now” it all started to look very fishy indeed.
So in the opening scenes of “Head's Up” we see how he survived – shimmying out from underneath Nicholas's body and hiding under a dumpster. It's a bit of a stretch, admittedly, but after so many weeks of wondering, we're willing to buy it. It's such a relief to have this plot line finally resolved (hilariously, the soundtrack is even doing 'hopeful' music while Nicholas is being munched on in the background) that the episode is a good halfway through before it becomes noticeable that this is another installment where very little actually happened.
Back at Alexandria young Ron is still in a piss with Carl and – ominously – insisting that Rick teaches him how to shoot. Sure, Rick doesn't give him any bullets, but that doesn't matter because the kid goes straight to the weirdly-unguarded armoury and steals some. Let's hope that there's some misdirection going on here, otherwise I think we can all guess what the final shot of next week will be.
In other dumb Alexandrian news, Spencer tried to flee the town by using a grappling hook to crawl over the heads of the massed walkers. He claims it's to try and draw the zombies away from the camp and, yeah, OK… maybe. Whether it really was a heroic gesture or just an attempt to save his own sorry ass is beside the point. It forces Rick and Tara to intervene and save the day (though shooting all those guns is bound to draw attention...). That said, it did lead to our favourite individual moment of the episode: a seriously narked Tara giving Rick the finger.
The episode's most interesting scene came with Morgan's grilling by Rick and Michonne. He's in trouble for not murdering all of the Wolves a few episodes back. In this world, compassion is a weakness – at least in Rick's eyes. It's a clever inversion of what you'd expect from an interrogation and there's bound to be repercussions further down the line. “The only thing that keeps you from being a monster is killing,” says Carol later in the episode, which just illustrates how truly screwed up things have got.
Finally, Carol follows Morgan and Denise (who now knows that one of the Wolves is being held captive) and it looks like things are going to kick off there until an unsafe building collapses, critically weakening Alexandria's defences. With zombies at the walls, Ron packing heat and the Wolves still out there, it looks like we're in for a cracking mid-season finale. It's just a shame that the show has dithered so much in the run up to it.
Writer | Channing Powell |
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Director | David Boyd |
The one where | Glenn escapes certain death, but the defences at Alexandria are crumbling... |