Check out this week’s episode recap of The Walking Dead! If you thought last week’s episode was intense, this one gets even crazier! Josh and Violet provide their thoughts on the episode as well.
Don’t need the The Walking Dead episode recap for JSS? Click here to jump directly to Violet’s thoughts on the episode!
To see Josh’s thoughts on this week’s The Walking Dead episode, JSS, click here to get directly there!
Episode Recap of The Walking Dead, Season 6 Episode 2: JSS
This episode of The Walking Dead begins with Enid, and her family some time ago, with her and her parents trying to figure out where to go, reading a map. Enid warns her parents that the walkers are coming, but they are too occupied with their map to listen. Cutting to the next scene, we see the walkers chomping on Enid’s parents, and her crying in their car. Then Enid is on her own for some time, trying to survive. We see her write “JSS” several times in these scenes–in the dirt, using animal bones, on a car window with her finger, and such. We see that she is a survivalist, killing a walker to get shelter in a car, killing a turtle to eat among other things. After some time she stumbles upon Alexandria, hearing commotion coming from inside. Happy commotion. She walks to the gate, and contemplates her next move. She turns to walk away ,but then the episode cuts to the gates opening and her walking inside, after scrawling “JSS” into the dirt in her hand.
Cutting back to the present, Carol is playing “Susie Homemaker”, talking with the women, about cooking and such. She gets a little snippy with a woman named Shelly, telling her to stop smoking inside the house. The other woman seem to take Carol’s side. Carol then heads home, to see Sam sitting on her porch. She sternly tells him to get over his abusive father’s dead, and to go home.
Moving over to Jessie’s house, she tries to give Ron a haircut Ron knows this hair cut is just a way to try to get to get Ron to talk to her. He gets pretty uppity about this talk that Jessie wants to have. It looks like Ron’s dad beat him so bad that Ron can’t move his arm above his head. Ron seemed to have enough and leaves.
Maggie meanwhile is working on improving the town–growing more vegetables. Deanna is with her, and Maggie tries to convince Deanna that they need to move on and improve the community.
Eugene and Tara head to the “hospital” to get some medicine, and they find Denise there, the new doctor. She’s a bit snippy, because she is a psychiatrist, with panic attacks, so she isn’t sure she can handle this. Denise asks Tara why she wants to aspirin, and offers to take a look at her.
Moving over to Carl, he is walking Judith in her stroller, and comes across Ron hanging out with Enid. He is confronted by Father Gabriel, who apologizes and now wants to help the group. He said he is ready to learn to fight now. Carl offers to train him later in the day.
Back to Carol she is making a dinner dish, and sees Shelly smoking out outside. Good for her! Except that–she is hacked to death by a mysterious assailant….
It looks like the Wolves have made it inside the gate. Maggie and Deanna hear the attacks, then see a lookout killed with some sort of molotov cocktail. They run for safety. Carl then gets told by Carol to get to safety with Judith. Jesse and Sam hide in one of their closets. Outside, chaos breaks loose with dozens of Wolves attacking citizens of Alexandria. Carl gets home, and finds Enid coming in the house. Enid tells Carl that she is leaving. Carl tells Enid to sit tight and help protect the house. Enid seems to think this place is too hard to protect with all of the blind spots.
We see several more citizens savagely murdered as Carol tries to stealth about. Se tries to save some of her “Susie Homemaker” friends, but one of them has been slashed pretty badly. She puts her out of her misery with a swift stab to the back of her lower head.
We then see Deanna’s son, Spencer, trying to pick some people off, but isn’t a good shot. Then we see the cause of the loud horn from the previous episode, which began drawing walkers to Alexandria. A semi-truck was ramped into the wall of the town, with the horn activated. Spencer tried to shoot at it to stop it, but it was a futile effort. Spencer tries to get down to the truck, and finally does. He has to take out the driver, which is now a walker. Unable to do so, Morgan shows up and finishes the job, getting the horn turned off too. Spencer tells Morgan about the group, and Morgan heads inside. Morgan is about to take on one of the men, but Carol shows up and shanks him with her knife. Carol has gone in disguise, wearing a shawl/robe and put a “W” on her head. He and Carol get into an argument, with Morgan not wanting to kill, and Carol saying it is necessary. But Carol puts her foot down, and says they have to get to the armory.
Back with Deanna and Maggie, Spencer has shown up, and they decide it is best to hide right outside the walls, since they don’t know how to fight. Maggie heads inside.
Meanwhile, at the hospital, Rosita, and a couple others bring in a woman, who has been severely wounded. Denise shuts down and doesn’t think she can help the woman. Tara and Eugene try to convince her to help, and she finally gets motivated to try.
Moving back to Carl, Ron is fleeing a wolf member, and Carl pops the Wolf in the leg. The man pleads for his life, but it is a trick–he grabs the barrel of Carl’s gun, and Carl is forced to shoot him dead. Carl offers to let Ron stay in their house for safety, but Ron refuses.
Back with Jessie, she comes out of her closet to look for Ron. She is attacked by a woman Wolf, and thrashed about some. the Wolf goes for the gun that Jessie dropped, but Jessie is able to grab the scissors she was going to cut Ron’s hair with, and screams and stabs this woman savagely as Ron watches.
Carol and Morgan meanwhile are pretending that Morgan is a captive of Carol’s, and when they get close to the armory, Morgan changes plans when he sees Father Gabriel being attacked. Morgan saves Father Gabriel, and Carol heads to the armory, taking a few Wolves out on the way. She gets inside the armory and takes a woman Wolf out. inside, she discovers Olivia, one of the “Susie Homemakers” hiding in a closet. Carol gives Olivia a gun, and tells her to shoot anyone who tries to enter the armory.
Back to Morgan, he is tying up a wolf, and Carol decides to execute this Wolf. Morgan is not happy about this at all. Carol gives Morgan a gun, but he doesn’t want it, and hands it to Gabriel, who doesn’t seem to want it either.
We then see Rosita and Aaron take out a few Wolves as well. Morgan meanwhile gets surrounded by a few wolves. Morgan tells them to leave, but they won’t. He whacks a few of them with his staff, and he warns them they will be shot at any time. On the way out, one of the Wolves finds a gun on the ground, and grabs it before he leaves the gate. Morgan gives chase, but stops, and shuts the gate behind them.
In the aftermath of the battle, Carol mourns the loss of Shelly, looking down at her slashed body, and cries. on a handrail, she sees a red “A”, which seems to be a reminder from the train car possibly? Carol handles one of Shelly’s cigarettes, while on the verge of tears.
Then moving to Eugene, he is making sure the dead will not rise again, when he finds his pack. The pack which contained the photos of Alexandria. It seems like he might think this attack might be some of his fault.
At the hospital, Denise has lost her first patient, and seems devastated. She wants to be alone, and Tara tells her to at least make sure that the woman is not going to turn into a walker. Spencer and Rosita walk, and talk about how this “world” is outside the walls. He seems shocked to see how savage it can be. Deanna and Maggie also talk, and Deanna mourns the loss of the people that died.
With Carl, he finds that Enid has left, and she has left a note behind. The note Reads “just survive somehow”… JSS. A timer goes off in the kitchen, and Carl pulls out some food that had been baking.
Meanwhile Morgan takes out a walker that is walking the streets. He heads into a house, and seems to detect something. He is right–a Wolf is hiding behind a wall. Morgan is able to take him out after a scuffle. Before he does, he recognizes this man as one of his attackers. Morgan whacks him pretty hard, but I am not sure if he died or not. We then see Morgan and Carol meet up on the streets, but they just walk past each other. Exhausted.
Josh’s Thoughts: The Walking Dead, Season 6 Episode 2: JSS
So I have been highly critical of The Walking Dead the past few season. I thought it quite often would ruin the momentum of the season with these “character developing” episodes, taking an intense ending to an episode, and deflating the next with the slow pace it would have. I thought that this was going to happen this episode, when starting with Enid’s back story. I found her back-story interesting, but didn’t want to spend an entire episode on it, and have to wait a whole week for the resolution of the end of the last episode. Then, bam! we see the mystery attacker go down, and the episode just amps up from there. So far season 6 has been my favorite in a while, and might be the best so far.
The episode seemed to want to highlight the conundrum in this new world–do you kill your enemy, or try other means to diffuse the situation. Morgan was not happy about the killing this episode. Carol meanwhile was more, “kill first, ask questions later”. While I am certainly respecting Morgan’s opinion, and given less dire circumstances–like the situation Morgan was in before he got to Alexandria with the Wolves, I could understand the non-lethal method of taking these guys down. But when these guys are savagely killing innocent people, and you have so many unknown factors about the attack, I am on Carol’s side–take them out before they can take anyone else out. The one question I had was what choice Morgan made with the last person he fought. It seemed to me like he killed this guy, but I don’t think episode was definitive in what happened. Him apologizing to this guy before he whacked him, seemed to indicate a lethal hit though.
But Carol–I used to be against Carol and her overzealous killing. Lately though, the situations she has been put in, I am much more of a Carol supporter. She was tough this episode, but still showed that she had humanity. She wasn’t just a broken person/sociopath. She is a no BS, does what she feels has to be done, type of person now. I have had a complete 180 feeling about her, even though I think she did some egregious things in the past.
I thought Carl had an interesting story this episode to, despite it being short. I feel like Carl had his redemption this episode, when we saw him shoot a man several seasons ago, when Hershel witnessed it. This time, Carl was going to show mercy, but he was forced to take the lethal shot by this aggressor.
But finally, Enid is a mystery. What we do know is that she is a survivor, given the abbreviation she likes to right down. I am guessing that is why she is leaving Alexandria. It sounds like she see the “writing on the wall”, when she tells Carl that there are too many “blind spots” in Alexandria. I think that Enid is going to move on, to find the next place to “JSS”. I am curious though–could this be with the Wolves? How dark and crazy would that be? I am not sure it would happen though–as the Wolves don’t seem too set on survival.
But again, I am back on board The Walking Dead train, and it is turning into by favorite show this year. I really hope it can sustain this excitement, as I am totally in so far.
Violet’s Thoughts on Season 6 Episode 2 of The Walking Dead: JSS
Just as I suspected, the source of the horn at the end of last week’s episode was an 18-wheeler truck that belongs to the Wolves. But at the time, I had guessed that either it was the Wolves blasting the horn, or some sort of alarm from the Alexandrians. It turns out that I was sort of right, but sort of wrong. The horn was accidentally blasted due to the Wolf driving the truck getting shot and killed, causing him to lay on the horn until his body was removed from it. So it wasn’t a malicious intent to try to draw the walkers away from Rick’s little project. They probably didn’t even know about that, in fact. Or did they? It seems like quite a coincidence that the attack would happen to be on the same day that Rick’s plan went down. I had theorized that the Wolves had something to do with that quarry full of walkers. Did they somehow trigger that truck to fall?
The other question is, how did they find their way to Alexandria? The show is making it look like the pictures they found in Aaron’s backpack that got left behind led them there. But it’s not like there was a map to the place. If Rick’s group just had those pictures to go off of when Aaron showed them the pictures, I doubt they would have been able to find the place. I suppose they could have tracked Daryl, Aaron, and Morgan after they set off the trap.
That brings us to what actually happened in the episode – the Wolves attacking Alexandria and Carol springing into action. Which was pretty awesome, I must say. There was a bit of controversy between Carol and Morgan about their ideologies of how to deal with the Wolves, in that Carol wanted to kill them, while Morgan did not. I thought it was kind of ridiculous for Morgan to try to merely restrain their attackers, who are trying to kill them. It was a question of self defense of people trying to kill them, so taking the extra time to tie them up leaves the person tying them up open to attack. That’s not worth the risk of one’s life, in my opinion. Carol’s method was much more effective to protect not only herself, but the community as well.
Thanks to Carol’s swift action, the community did not fall to the Wolves. But we do have to worry about that gun that one of the Wolves ran off with. I’m sure that will come up again at some point down the road.
Now I just want to know what happened to all those walkers that veered off the path and went toward Alexandria when that horn blew. I guess we’ll see what happened with that in the next episode, and I am looking forward to it!
Scenes from The Walking Dead, Season 6 Episode 3: Thank You
Here are scenes from the next episode of The Walking Dead, titled Thank You:
