Tales of the Walking Dead – Evie/Joe

By: Kelly Kearney

A year after the fall, doomsday prepper Joe ventures out beyond the doors of his bunker and into what’s left of the world in search of an online friend he knew from before. On his mission he runs into another survivor and through their travels he learns more about the world and his place in it than he ever knew eating canned food in a basement with his beloved Doberman. 

Bunker Life

Every day is the same when your life is locked behind the four walls of your apocalyptic prepper bunker; not that Joe (Terry Crews) minds the endless monotony. Years before the end of the world, he was already living a solitary life with just his Doberman, Gilligan, and his online girlfriend, Sandra, to pass the time. Now his days are filled with trips outside the bunker for his dog to relieve himself, and a whole lot of Ohio State football videos he watches with pride and praise. Joe is a survivor but is this what living looks like? He questions this when his firstmate and life partner Gilligan the dog dies protecting him from “toe-tags” during a late-night bathroom break. Without his sidekick keeping him company Joe decides to set out on his trike motorcycle in search of the only other person he knows, and after going through their online correspondences he thinks he has an idea of her general location. 

Having been locked behind the walls of safety means Joe is unfamiliar with the true threats of this world: humans. He’s not out of the bunker 24 hours before he winds up ensnared in a net strung up by a vegan hipster who almost instantly grates on his nerves. Evie (Olivia Munn) is her name, and she agrees to cut him free if he wears handcuffs because one can never be too sure nowadays. The “toe-tags” A/K/A walkers are predictable killers, but humans – that’s another story. Evie says she needs a ride out of town and Joe’s bike is the perfect mode of transportation. She just needs him to go tag along since he modified the bike so only he can drive it.

The next day the two hit the road and slowly their moods towards each other change. Sure, the muscular football fan and doomsday prepper is never going vegan, but the fact Evie managed to live this long with a certain level of naivety must mean there’s a hidden survivor beneath all those Burning Man stories. That, Joe, thinks he can work with. Not to mention the fact she is also a dog lover, and even though his best friend died, anyone who loves dogs can’t be all bad. The two seem to easily fill in each other’s gaps- teaching each other valuable skills to survive this chaotic world. Unfortunately, trust isn’t one of them. For Evie, that must be earned so cuffs stay on until she is sure he’s trustworthy. She’s not cruel about it and outside of the occasional bathroom situation, Joe gets it–not that he likes it. 

Destination: Lost Loves

Late one night around the campfire, Evie entertains herself by snooping through Joe’s bag hoping to find clues to who he really is–the guy beyond the muscles and prepper bunker. People only carry important things now, so she should get a good read on her traveling partner. When she lands on a book composed of all the chats between himself and his online prepper girlfriend, she is shocked to know the big guy has a sensitive side, “poetry and puppies? Who are you?’ she asks. “None of your business,” he says, and that seems to knock her off her high horse a bit. It forces her to confide in him about this mission she’s dragged him on and how she too is looking for some sort of lost love–another thing they have in common. Feeling guilty about the way she’s judged him, she makes a point to cover Joe with a blanket when he lies down in the dirt for sleep. 

As they make their way through the barren buckeye state Evie, unlike Joe, is full of positivity. The world that they’ve known is over and yet, she still sees the magic in a sunset. Joe, not so much. He sees maggots crawling on toe tags, but for her, he will agree that there MIGHT be a little beauty left out there, even if he hasn’t seen it yet. Slowly she is rubbing off on him, not that he would admit that. In the “before times” these two would’ve never been friends, but now everything has changed and many have found unlikely partners.

Later that night the two travelers are awakened by the sounds of the dead surrounding their campsite. Joe begs Evie to unlock his cuffs and let him fight, but instead of handing him the key she hands him two small axes. Somehow he manages to take out the entire mini horde with the help of Evie who shows off some of her amazing fighting skills. She constantly surprises Joe, especially when she saves him from a nippy toe tag that latched onto his pant leg. They notice one of the dead had his heart cut out of his chest, and after they take care of the threats. Evie admits she hopes the creature lost it after they turned. In this world (and in some cases the old one too) one can never be too sure – humans have always come in many flavors with some of them having a taste for blood. 

After their teamwork takedown of the toe-tags Evie tosses Joe the keys with a “I love you in bracelets but…” and the two get back on the road – only this time Evie drives and Joe leads their travel sing-a-long through the towns of Michigan. Eventually, they stop for the night and make camp in an empty building where lucky Joe finds a bottle of bourbon and offers Evie a sip. She doesn’t drink and she smokes weed, but she takes him up on his offer of powdered orange juice. Safe and with a stomach full of liquor and juice, the two new friends finally talk about where they are heading. Evie wasn’t exactly transparent about her plans when she forced Joe at gunpoint to take her on his bike out of Ohio. They’re Mount Pleasant bound, and Joe is shocked because that’s ten miles from where he’s headed. “What are the odds?” he asks, but Evie isn’t into statistical probabilities and just chalks it up to more of that magic she’s always talking about. Joe can’t wrap his mind around her hippy-dippy outlook but she explains that the universe itself made her into a survivor. She tells him about her life before the fall and her artist husband who painted people he hated. The last time they spoke they said awful things to each other and went their separate ways. It’s been over a year since the world ended and Evie is determined to find him and make things right. “I’ve been waiting for a miracle to take me there, and then you came.” That makes Joe smile and since she shared her story he decides it’s time to share his. He hands her his diary of online chats with the woman he’s searching for. He trusts Evie, and it’s a good thing he does because she figured out where this woman lives by her rants about the new age donut shop opening up near her house. It’s a small detail in a sea of online chats but Evie knows where that shop is and it’s only twelve-ish hours away. It’s good news but it also means saying goodbye to each other and for some reason that kind of sours their excitement. They’ve grown fond of one another and neither seems ready to end their partnership. That is until a lamb tied to a brick shows up and the fuzzy-tailed baby distracts them long enough for its owner to steal Joe’s bike! Everything they owned was on that bike – including his beloved Ohio State championship helmet. Now they’re both angry and start tossing the blame around and trading insults. Joe wonders if her husband Steve was right to bail on her–ouch! and Evie calls Joe a pathetic loner who was happy to get captured by her because it added excitement to his lonely life. Her husband might be a jerk but at least she has good memories of happier times. What does he have? Rations and his prized helmet? The truth bombs hurt and they’re meant to; so much so that Joe drops an F-bomb and her gun–which he just learned was never loaded and takes off on his own. 

He manages to find his girlfriend’s house and luckily she spots him on a security camera before the dead swarm. A trap door opens in the ground and Joe dives in–hurting his leg, but thrilled to finally come face to face with Sandra (Kersti Bryan). She seems sweet and helps him inside her underground bunker–even offering him a home-cooked brownie. 

Stoner Educated

Topside and still carrying the lamb she refused to let Joe name “dinner,” Evie makes her way to the cabin Steven ran off to. Nobody is home but the hate portraits and one of her, hidden behind the rest, that’s definitely a vision of love. Wherever Steve is, it seems he has forgiven her and that’s enough to allow Evie to move on.

Back to the bunker where Joe’s vision starts to get blurry and it’s not because he’s tired. He realizes that was no ordinary brownie Sandra fed him and she’s probably not the woman he thought she was. Armed with a cleaver and now wearing make-up that makes her look like she’s auditioning for the remake of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane, she zip-ties Joe’s wrists together and then slices his throat with surface cuts when he refuses to tell her the real reason he came looking for her. She’s lost it, having been locked down there for a year, fending off visitors trying to kill her for her bunker. So many visitors that she has collected a box of watches from her victims. She admits the screams of the living being devoured by the dead used to get to her but now she craves them and is ready to hear Joe’s! She slips off his watch to add it to her collection and then attempts to strike him down with a swing of a cleaver, but like magic, the blade bounces off a crystal necklace Evie gave him before their fight. This gives Joe a second to turn the tides on Sandra and fight for his life. While the two tumble around the bunker an alarm goes off alerting Sandra to another visitor and this time it’s Evie! Sandra accuses Joe of bringing back up and ties him to a pipe so she can open the hatch and lure Evie and the lamb inside her deadly lair. Sandra is all smiles as she feeds Evie a laced brownie while playing the happy and clueless host. Joe? Joe who? Do you mean the man muzzled in the other room listening to Sandra try to convince Evie that he might be dead while also pushing her to eat more of the brownie? Luckily for Evie’s stoner past, she is no amateur and knows an edible when she tastes one. She calls Sandra out on it and the woman responds by swinging a hidden cleaver at her face! As we saw earlier in the episode, Evie is trained in some sort of Brazilian jiu-jitsu and knocks Sandra down with ease–taking the cleaver from her and cutting Joe free. Moments later Sandra comes to and charges at them both, but football fan Joe stops her when he lobs a Hail Mary dagger pass directly into her chest. Sandra bleeds out right next to their little lamb but reanimates just as Evie is trying to push a stoned Joe back up through the bunker hatch. They manage to close the door on toe-tag Sandra before she can do more damage–finally safe from Joe’s crazy online girlfriend. Still high as a kite, Joe can’t help but laugh about what a wild ride this all has been. He also announces he has the munchies but it seems he’s lost his taste for lamb. The next morning, he has a heart-to-heart with Evie about how lonely and lost he was before he left his bunker and wound up in her net. Maybe she’s right about magic bringing them together? She changed him and their little lamb they’ve decided to name Skipper. Life is good; or as good as it can be in the apocalypse. Gilligan must be smiling down on his dad, knowing he finally found the companionship he was desperate for.