The Walking Recap – TWD S4E12 “Still”

Yesterday’s “The Walking Dead” episode focused solely on Daryl and Beth and Beth’s quest for alcohol.

No, really.

Seriously.

Beth wants to have a drink. Of alcohol. And it drives the entire episode.

Because Beth is the most interesting character on TWD, guys.

Beth!

BETH.

MUTHAFUCKIN’BETHBITCHES

WELL, the episode starts off with Beth and Daryl still on the run from all of the zombies in Georgia. They find a smashed up car in the middle of a road and, without any other available shelter and with a hoard of walkers approaching in the distance, they climb into the trunk and spend the night in the rather spacious hiding place.

What kind of car is that? Because that’s a tremendous amount of storage in back!

 

Afterwards, they collect all kinds of goodies, like broken glass and hubcaps and shit, and you have to wonder what the fuck good that shit is going to be. Turns out, they’re setting up a teensy weensy little campsite with hubcaps on strings as perimetre alarms, using the broken (and curved) glass to start a fire via solar energy, and shit. Daryl catches them a snake for dinner.

Yum Yum Yum!

As Daryl chows down (fun fact: he’s actually eating almost an entire eel, not a significant portion of snake), Beth tries to needle him into helping her to get a drink. He wordlessly tosses her a bottle of brown water and continues eating because food is way more important than Beth. She dismisses it and his nonchalance, telling him that she wants alcohol.

Yes, alcohol. Because her father was just killed, and he was a recovering alcoholic, and the best way for her to honour his memory would be to dishonour his memory.

Anywho, because Daryl isn’t particularly keen on the idea, she storms off in a huff, and didn’t we do this already two episodes ago? And didn’t she come across walkers alone in the woods? But it’s okay! Because this time, Beth is ready for them! Her brilliant plan?

Throw a rock somewhere else and hope that they follow the sound.

 

Luckily, her master plan works… And Daryl is actually right behind her just in case anyways. He brings her back to the camp and she flips out on him, and he sullenly follows her as they embark on this half-assed Odyssey to booze it up.

They happen upon a golf course and club house and set off to inspect the grounds.

“Golfers like to booze it up, right”

 

Inside, they come across the usual string of bodies, plus three people hung from the rafters, still kicking because their ends weren’t met with massive head trauma. As Beth looks around, Daryl starts shoveling cash and jewelry into a sack for some reason, only stopping because walkers are banging at the doors, and every door is full of panes of glass and every window is massive, so they’ve got to keep on keeping on. They venture further into the building and Beth comes across her first bottle of liquor.

BTW, she stepped over a corpse to get to this bottle, and didn’t even bother to at least stomp on its head to make sure that it wouldn’t try to bite her or anything.

We never find out what it was, though, as she ends up having to smash it against the head of a walker that snuck up on her as she left herself wide open to grasp at a half-empty bottle of hooch on a high shelf.

They go deeper into the building, apparently into a basement, and find a gift shop. Beth immediately starts looking through clothes and picks out a canary yellow polo shirt and a white. Fucking. CARDIGAN.

Because light colours and country club style are the perfect accoutrements to the Zombie Apocalypse. And she’ll never get this shit dirty. Never ever. And, gee golly goshums, it’s just so darned cute!

Ugh.

Well, Daryl and Elizabeth (because she’s fancy now) come across a grizzly sight.

Well, grizzlier than usual in this world full of walkers.

 

A mutilated corpse, stuck onto a mannequin, with a sign hung around it’s neck reading “Rich Bitch.” Which says to me that this wasn’t a walker, but a woman. These people were abused and murdered and left to turn or to rot.

So, this has to be significant, right? Haven’t we seen zombies with insulting signs on them before? Something about sins. I doubt that these would be the same people, but there could be a group of fundamentalists and a group of rednecks out there murdering for fun and/or a sense of righteousness.

And then there’s still Terminus, isn’t there? Does this tie in?

Also in the gift shop, Beth finds a souvenir spoon for Washington DC. A clue that they’ll be leaving Georgia soon? Probably, given Abraham’s appearance on the show. Plus summer break would be an ideal time for the show to gloss over much of the traveling like they did with most of Lori’s pregnancy way back in the day.

Beth wants to take down the woman’s body, but ain’t nobody got time for that, so she has to settle for Daryl’s ever-so-subtly draping a big blue blanket over her head.Shortly thereafter, zombies come in and Daryl takes them all out, bashing in the last one’s head with a golf club, and sending a splatter of blood and brains on Beth’s nice new ensemble.

And I like to think of this moment as one of purposeful passive aggression.

They finally find the bar, and Daryl makes a game of throwing darts at pictures of rich dudes, while Beth cries over a bottle of peach schnapps in the background. Daryl very kindly saves us all from this awkwardness by smashing the bottle and telling her that he will not allow her first drink to be peach schnapps.

By the way, Beth. It’s been one day. ONE DAY. And look at your shirt.

The walk through the woods some more, because that’s about 90% of this show when they aren’t in a safe place for extended periods of time, and come across a… Let’s call it a hovel. But, luckily for them, it’s got a shed around back devoted to a moonshine still.

Oh! Oh, that’s the title of the episode! Whomp whomp.

But they go to clear the place out, intent of getting blitzed in this hugely exposed shack with broken windows and rotted roof and walls.

Beth is finally good for something, cradling the booze in her arms more protectively than half of the characters ever did Judith.

Beth takes her first drink with a grimace and then downs the rest in one second go. She and Daryl talk and it’s clear that while Beth is disdainful of the little house, Daryl could practically call it home. His dad was a redneck who had his own still, spitoon, and shit to fire his gun at randomly around the house.

Meeeeeeemoriiiiiiiiieeees…

They once again inexplicably leave a walker to its own devices in favour of something trivial. Beth wants to play a drinking game! One character states something they’ve never done, and one or the other character drinks based on whether or not they’ve done it. It’s all in lame fun, just mildly insulting to Daryl as he admits that his childhood was not quite the best, until Beth says that she’s never been in prison.

This is the precise moment where Daryl’s feelings are actually hurt.

 

He tells her to drink up, and she presses it, trying to get him to admit that he’s been in jail at least in some capacity. He ignores her and takes a piss in the house, getting louder and listing things he’s never done. All of the little things that Beth probably did all of the time growing up and never thought twice about. The walker outside gets louder and Daryl announces that he’s going to teach her how to shoot a crossbow. That it’ll be fun.

Anybody else hear banjo music?

 

He pins the walker to the tree with a couple of shots before Beth breaks free and stabs it in the head, ending Daryl’s little game. She tells him that killing them shouldn’t be fun, that she wants him to stop acting like he doesn’t care about the people they’ve lost, that all that he sees when he looks at her is another dead girl.

Um, to be fair, you couldn’t really blame him.

 

She goes on to defend herself, saying that, even though she’s not tough like Michonne, Carol, or Maggie, she’s still a survivor.

…Sigh. Look, okay, yes, you’ve made it, against all odds. But, girl, you’re still for the most part useless. You spent this whole episode being bitchy and looking for a substance to abuse which would ultimately further compromise your ability to survive in this universe. So don’t go on and get all high and mighty about your own awesomeness because there’s little to be had. In fact, your best defence, at least to the fans, for a case debating your worthiness to still be amongst the survivors is that A.) you’re so plain that, until now, viewers would hardly care if you got got, and B.) you’ve been paired with arguably the most popular single character on the show. No doubt to increase interest in your character. No offense to Emily Kinney, who is a fine actress, but the character of Beth has seldom been useful and more often than not fallen a bit flat.

SO.

She goes on to throw the death of Sophia in his face, saying that she remembers his reaction to seeing her as a walker, and that she knows that it hurt him and that now he’s too afraid to let people get close to him.

He fires back that she’s lost everyone, and all that she’s focusing on is trying to get drunk. He tells her that she’s never going to see Maggie again…

And then he blames himself for stopping his search for the Governor, letting the lunatic just stroll on up to them and ruin everything.

Um. Couple things.

1.) When was Daryl looking for the Governor? I distinctly remember a very dedicated Michonne (at least at first) going out to try and find that MoFo, but was Daryl ever doing that? Was he even ever all that devoted to that cause?

2.) It’s not like everything was perfect, bro. Remember the whole Downton Abbey storyline? The Spanish flue that took out a massive chunk of your strays from Woodbury? Because we all totally thought that those red shirts were gonna last long……

But, basically, Daryl blames himself. Same thing with Sophia, BTW, Beth! He wasn’t particularly close to that girl, but he took it personally as a failure, especially since he had actually tried to hard to find her and bring her back to her mother.

But, at least Beth doesn’t blame him in the slightest for what happened at the prison, or for what happened to her father.

And Daryl cries!

 

That night, we get a Merle story! Merle inadvertently for once insults a guy that they’re doing drugs with and a fight breaks out, ending in a Mexican standoff over Scooby Doo. It ended in laughter, oddly enough, but Daryl tells her that that kind of thing happened to him a lot. That he was a nobody before the ZA. Apparently a big reveal for some people, but exactly what I’ve thought all along. Tethered to his asshole brother. But he misses him. And Beth misses Maggie. And her brother who got bit before the barn was overrun. And that she had imagined that they all could have been safe in the prison, that people would have babies, that her dad would’ve been a grandfather someday and gotten older than dirt and everything would have been peaceful.

Daryl tells her that that was how things should have been, and then gets introspective, saying that he still hasn’t escaped his life. Beth tells him that he’ll be the last one standing, which is super not a comforting thought, especially for a guy like Daryl who feels like he has such a tenuous grip on this life with other people in it, people who for the most part think the world of him.

Daryl tells her that they should go inside. Beth cheerfully suggests arson!

Aaaand, they go with arson. Using the money that Daryl swiped from the country club as a fire starter.

And using the moonshine to soak the rotting wood as extremely nasally sung acoustic music plays in the background.

 

And, hey, I’m sure that that was really cathartic! But you’ve also probably started a fucking wildfire and you’ve been walking circles in the woods in Georgia for a couple of years now!

Well, maybe that’s their motivation for leaving for Washington DC.

But no mention of Terminus yet for them. Interesting…

Well, not much happened to actually advance the plot in this episode, but I suppose it was good to check in with some other survivors, even though I really don’t want to watch a bunch of solo-starring episodes until the end of the season.

Ah, well.

Feel the love.

Until next time.