The Walking Dead – On The Inside

By: Kelly Kearney

The last time we saw Connie she was covered in mud and desperately trying to find her way back home after the cave-in. While Carol, Kelly, Lydia and Magna go out to look for her after last week’s Whisperer’s tip, we find Connie and Virgil on the run from a pack of walkers that seem to be herding them towards a safe house. What they find inside is anything but safe, but what fans found revealing in this episode was a new Virgil and a bond between these two unlikely friends that goes deeper than many expected to see. So, lets dive right in to the first stand-alone horror episode in The Walking Dead universe.

On The Run

We begin with the traveling companions and now trusted friends Virgil (Kevin Carroll) and Connie (Lauren Ridloff) as they run through the woods with a pack of walkers hot on their trail. In the clearing Virgil spots a house, and while Connie is wary to trust this oasis in the middle of the walker filled forest, she agrees to kick the door in and wait out the ambling herd. Once inside the mood is creepy and more so than your average abandoned, what looks to be, a haunted house. Right off the bat we see the communication problems pop up between Virgil and Connie. With a notepad and a pencil, the two are golden, but without it they are both lost in translation, which we soon find out can lead to some deadly and unexpected consequences.

After they shutter themselves in doors Virgil tells Connie to rest while he sweeps the house for any threats. The house appears clean, but Connie (who hasn’t slept for days and is really starting to worry Virgil) just wants to be sure. She wants that second check peace of mind, so she ventures up to the second floor of the house and right away things seem out of sorts. At this point viewers see things through Connie’s perspective and the sound cuts off. We see her using her other senses to snuff out trouble, from her hands on the walls searching for vibrations to her eyes looking for dust from any movement in the house. She immediately places her hands on the family portraits adorning the walls. Each have scratches over their eyes like some kind of warning that these people witnessed a nightmarish event go down in those four walls. She moves on past the gallery of missing eyes to the bathroom where she takes a second to finally gaze at herself in the dusty mirror. It’s not often our survivors get the luxury of mirror time or to really think about how they look. Not liking what she sees, Connie gives herself a big thumbs down and shrugs it off because this is the apocalypse and not a runway, which by the way she would still slay even with the filth and grime coating her skin and clothes. Next, she scans the medicine cabinet looking for any old prescriptions that at this point, might as well be made of gold because their value is immeasurable. She doesn’t find anything but then spots a hole at the back of the cabinet and peers inside to see a human eye looking back at her! There is someone or thing inside the walls! Panicked, Connie runs downstairs to tell a napping Virgil what she saw but when her pencil breaks, she cannot motion to him of the danger. He doesn’t understand until she takes his knife and carves out the words “NOT ALONE!” Now, Virgil is panicked but with the walkers right outside and no energy or weaponry to fight off a mini herd, they are stuck in that house under the threatening watchful eye.

Wings Off, It’s Torture Time

Meanwhile, Daryl (Norman Reedus) is with the Reapers torturing Frost (Glenn Stanton) to get answers out of him. Pope (Ritchie Coster) puts Daryl on finger cutting duty and having no other option but to gain the volatile leader’s trust, he first tries to strangle the truth out of Frost but then grabs his blade. He shrugs off his angel wings because the man about to do this isn’t the Daryl  that Judith gifted with those wings and he knows it. He tells Frost one more time to give up Maggie’s location and when the loyal survivor refuses he cuts one of his fingers off. It is brutal and the looks passed between Frost and Daryl are filled with regret, pain and anger and it leads to a reveal. He tells them the location of the safe house Maggie and the others are hiding in and Pope seems impressed with Daryl’s ability to get it out of him. He orders Leah (Lynn Collins), Daryl, Carver (Alex Meraz) and a few other Reapers to go sweep the house and kill the marked ones.

When they arrive in the suburban enclave, the Reapers spread out while Daryl hangs back and tries to signal to Maggie (Lauren Cohan) that a threat is coming. Lucky for her she spots his signal right away and gets down in the hidden trap door that leads to the basement right before the Reapers bust through the front door to the house. They sweep the place clean and assume Frost lied, but in the commotion Daryl spots a moved rug over the trap door and manages to cover it back up best he can. Carver, the Reaper who really hates Daryl which might be fueled by his jealousy over his past with Leah, starts a fight, blaming Daryl for the failed search. He doesn’t trust him and is angry Leah does. Daryl openly admits he doesn’t care about Carver or any of the Reapers; he is just there for Leah, which doesn’t go over well at all. As the two continue to beat their chests and macho things up, Daryl manages to slip in a clue about the twenty Reapers behind the well-stocked walls of Meridian, just hoping Maggie is listening and taking a mental note. At that point, Carver spots the corner of the trap door peeking out from the rug and when they pull it open, Maggie and friends are nowhere to be found. Because while all the Reapers are in the house and down in the hide out, they managed to make their way outside and back to the woods.

Together

Back to the shut-ins, Connie tries to show Virgil the peek-a-boo behind the wall but there is nobody there and now he is starting to wonder if her lack of sleep has led to some hallucinations. As the exit the bathroom the door closes in front of Virgil’s face, separating the two and making it an easy hunt for whatever is inside that house. The audio cuts out again and Connie goes into a panic but still manages to keep a level head as she surveys her surroundings and starts plotting her way out of this deadly nest of what, she isn’t too sure, and she isn’t about to wait and find out. What she makes up for in visual and tactile surveillance of the house, her loss of hearing is something the beings in the house use against her. The silence is palpable as we see a feral human on all fours stalking behind her. When they take off after Connie, we start to understand about all the horrors Maggie spoke of on her travels. These Feral people are cannibals and use the walkers to herd human prey right to the perceived safety of their home and hungry bellies. Connie takes off running while the feral person leaps and crawls across the house floor and off the furniture like some kind of cannibal monkey. Connie runs and hides and ends up in the crawl space of the wall where she saw the eye looking back at her! Through a peephole, she spots Virgil in the bathroom and tries to signal to him by pounding in the wall, which only intensifies when she spots a feral hiding in the room behind him. As she pounds, Virgil creeps closer to the wall but it’s too late, the Feral attacks and drags her friend to the ground with its gnashing teeth. He manages to fight them off stabbing them with his knife and then makes his way to the pounding on the wall. Assuming it is another Feral fighting their way out and to him, he drives his hunting blade through the drywall inches from Connie’s head! She knows she has to get the peephole open enough for him to see it is her, so as he is stabbing the wall, she is desperately trying to tear it apart, until finally Virgil sees her hand he grabs it. With all his might he rips the wall down and pulls Connie into an embrace. She is safe, for now, and the two sit down and talk. With one knife between the two and a whole community waiting for Connie to come home, Virgil does the selfless thing and tells her no matter what happens she has to take the knife and make it home. Michonne’s mercy prevailed over her wrath when he drugged and locked her up during his fall into mental illness after he lost his wife. She gave him that chance so that he could find Connie and his mission is now to make sure that chance Michonne gave him isn’t wasted. She has to make it home; it is his last wish if this world gives him one. Connie refuses and will not go along with this idea. As the emotions between the two swells, she joins their hands in a promise that from now on they do this together. With tears in his eyes and his bleeding heart on his sleeve, he repeats “together” while he holds her hand. And it isn’t long before they get to try out this new ride or die relationship when they exit the bathroom and are attacked by a leaping Feral who lands on Virgil’s back! The cannibal stabs him a few times, but Connie knocks him out with a broken bed post. They stay cornered in the room when they see more Ferals emerge prompting Connie to dive into action. She stabs a dead walker inside the front door and slathers herself and Virgil in guts and then opens the door and lets the walkers in. The crowd shuffles right past both of the cowering gore-covered friends and rip the Ferals apart piece by not-so-delicious piece, leaving the path free for both Connie and Virgil to escape.

The Cavalry

While all this is going down, Kelly (Angel Theory) took the news about her sister camping out near Alexandria as a challenge to find her. She ignored Aaron’s (Ross Marquand) wishes to wait until they can gather a group until morning and went off on her own. When Carol (Melissa McBride) hears she is gone all their planning goes out the window. Ever since their heart to heart after the cave-in, Kelly looks up to Carol and the two have created this whole mentor/fangirl connection. It might surprise those who blame Carol for Connie’s predicaments, but Kelly never did and I suspect her kind-hearted sister won’t either. So, Carol, along with her other sidekick these days, Lydia (Cassady McClincy), and Magna (Nadia Hilker) take off after Kelly and they find her tearfully sitting next to Connie’s abandoned camp. She just missed her and it breaks her apart, but Carol gathers Kelly up and the four head towards that familiar looking safe house with a Feral surprise inside. They never make it indoors for the big cannibal reveal because the minute they get closer Connie and Virgil are attacked by an escaped Feral in the woods! Luckily, Kelly is a sharpshooter with that slingshot because she takes out the Feral and comes face to face with her sister. The two sisters stare at each other stunned with tears cascading down their faces and their arms open wide. A long-awaited embrace, like a collective sigh of relief, brings these two back together. And while we never did get to see Carol’s reaction, we just know a forgiving talk between Daryl’s guilt-ridden best friend and his new, very much alive, friend will be on the horizon.

Speaking of the guy stuck in this triangle of strong woman, Daryl and the Reapers make it back to camp to find Pope proud as a peacock and waiting for them. Even though they didn’t find Maggie, he is still proud of them and then we see it; a dead Frost is tied to a post and now a walker. Pope tells the crew with a smile that after a lot of persuasion (torture) Frost enlightened him on a few details he left out. Then, he turns his sociopathic attention to Daryl and his smile intensifies as he invites Carver in for a hushed huddle that cannot be good news for the newbie. There is no telling what the threat of death can do to someone as loyal as Frost. Did he reveal Daryl’s connection to Maggie? Is Pope setting a trap Daryl is about to walk into? Which side will Leah choose; her family, or the guy she’s spent a few nights with in a cabin six years ago? With the penultimate episode coming next week, time is running out on this Reaper arc faster than that horse jerky at Alexandria. Get ready for an action-packed next two weeks as we wrap up part A of the final season of “The Walking Dead.”