Rick, Morgan, and Carol come full circle on The Walking Dead while Jadis has Negan for a little bit. Here’s our recap of “Still Gotta Mean Something”!
During the opening moments, we see that Simon had no intention of leaving Jadis alive. She’s running from Saviors and uses the blood of one of her own dead people to make it look like she was shot and killed.
After they all leave, she gets up and takes off her clothes so that she’s wearing the outfit Rick and Michonne found her in.
Later, she walks into one of her storage containers that looks like it was furnished by Ikea. It’s sleek, clean, and modern. Very Spartan. After a brief cry, she packs up some stuff, takes a bat wrapped in barbed wire, I assume she made herself, and then goes and gets Negan’s ass out of a storage crate.
She rolls him out on little P.E. scooters and he’s not happy because she has a fake Lucille.
“What the shit? No, really. Just tell me. What the shit?”
He yells as she rolls him into the sunlight.
—-
At Hilltop, several interactions happen at the same time almost.
Carol is chopping wood when Ezekiel walks up. He wants to go out searching for Henry, but Carol says that she’s not going to go look for him.
“You think he’s already dead. Is that what you believe? Or can you not allow yourself to believe otherwise? You told me to pretend to make it real until it is so, and you cannot. It may not be so. I fear for Henry. You. Who I thought were the bravest person I’ve met?”
“No.”
“You…You’re stopped by cowardice.”
Daryl is sitting on the tailgate of a truck when Tara comes up. She says that she’s obviously not going to turn since it’s been over a day since she was hit with the arrow. She tries to get Daryl to see that Dwight shot her with a clean one to save her from someone else shooting her, but Daryl isn’t buying it.
For some reason, they’ve completely switched sides. A couple of weeks ago, Daryl was giving Dwight the benefit of the doubt and now it’s Tara. I’ll be happy when these two settle this argument.
Inside, Michonne reads Carl’s letter, asks Rick if he wants to read it. He hasn’t even read his own letter yet. He tells Michonne that he just can’t read it yet. Michonne tells him that he’s not leaving until he reads it and she goes even further saying that he’s not leaving Hilltop at all.
Can you guess what he does later?
—
Out in the yard, Carol finds Morgan who is about to leave to hunt the Saviors and she decides to join him.
“You goin’ lookin’ for him? For them. You don’t have to, Morgan.”
“I do. I could’ve before, and I should’ve. I was supposed to. See, we’re the same, and I was supposed to, and I thought that…thought I had to. Thought it’d be different.”
“Morgan. Fine, but I’m coming with you.”
Maggie, Rosita, Daryl and Jesus are inside the house at Hilltop. They’re discussing how to take care of the leftover Saviors. Daryl recommends going hand-to-hand, but Rosita tells them they need to take out the bullet maker or the destroy the outpost so no one can make bullets anymore.
I just have a bad feeling about all this, to be honest.
—-
At the trash heap, Jadis and Negan are in the same position we left them in. He’s attached to the scooters still and Jadis is sitting on a pile of trash. In an uncharacteristic move, Negan apologizes to her and says he trusted the wrong person. He promises to help her get it all back. She takes Lucille and brings it down but stops right before she hits him in the head.
—-
Morgan and Carol are in the woods, looking for Saviors when Morgan starts running off, yelling for Henry. When he reaches a break in the woods, he sees dead Henry. It’s just another hallucination, though.
When Carol gets to him, she looks around for who he is talking to, and they have another heart-to-heart.
“I didn’t come out here to look for him. I came out here to keep an eye on you.”
“Yeah, I’ve seen it. You save people. I’ve seen it again and again. But you can’t save the dead, Carol.”
“You’re not dead.”
“I know. Not me. I don’t die. I just see it. Again and again. Again and again. And even when I look away, still see it.”
This whole episode is deeply rooted in winding down Morgan’s arc with the characters he’s been closest to.
—-
Rick stares at the sheriff’s hat, and then runs out to talk to the Savior that’s still there. He gives him a lead and then asks for a favor.
“If you happen to find them, don’t kill anymore than you have to.”
He says that the guys from last night made the wrong choice and could change. Rick says he could do that, but he says it in a way that’s a total no.
—-
Jadis is still hanging out with Negan. She drops Lucille in a wheelbarrow and walks off. She pushes a walker out on a cart and he’s all 90 degrees now and chomping. If she releases a latch, he’d fall down and eat Negan’s face. Unfortunately, no one can kill Negan no matter how close they get to him.
She walks away from him, and Negan gets close to the bag of guns and photos. He has a flair in one hand and a gun in the other.
Negan points a gun at her and tells her that it’s time for them to have a heart-to-heart or he’ll burn the pictures.
How she managed to be in charge of his situation then end up the prisoner while Negan is STILL tied up is beyond me.
—
Carol and Morgan are Savior hunting still when a walker comes stumbling across the road with Henry’s stick in the back.
“Morgan, stop. It came from the other road. We go that way, maybe Maybe we can find him.”
“We take that road, you know what we’ll find.”
“But I don’t. I decided I decided what it would be, but I won’t know unless I go unless I try, and you can try, too.”
“No. No, I can’t. You save people. I watch ’em die. I have to. I’m supposed to.”
“When I tried to run, you found me. You saved me. You knew I could come back, and you can, too.”
“That wasn’t me. I’m not strong like you. I was there that whole time, watchin’ ’em, knowin’ that something would happen. I knew it. I saw it. I was waiting for it to happen, and then it did, like it Like it always does. So I just have to…I have to kill ’em. I have to.”
In the end, they go their separate ways. Morgan to kill the Saviors and Carol to find Henry.
—-
Back at the trash pile, Negan tries to reason with Jadis. He gives her his sob story that the bat is the only thing he has left of his dead wife. Just like the pictures are the last link that Jadis has to her people.
This is so dangerous. They writers are humanizing Negan and trying to have people empathize with him. This is a man who rapes women, murders people viciously while saying that he’s “saving” them. He’s a sociopath. Stop doing this! Just let a character be irredeemable.
During all this, Jadis pushes the cart with the walker toward Negan. He shoots it and wastes his bullets, allowing Jadis to jump over him and try and grab for the flair. They struggle and it falls into the only puddle that exists in Virginia.
This is really bad news because a helicopter flies overhead and hoovers. She finally gets another flair lit, but it flies away before it sees her.
I swear, y’all, if this helicopter is what takes Morgan to FTWD, I will lose it.
—
Morgan and Rick are searching for Saviors and the end up at road where they find a severed arm and leg. Rick feels like their in the right spot, but he’s quickly knocked unconscious.
When he wakes up, Rick realizes that he and Morgan have been captured and are at the hands of the Saviors.
Morgan and Jared get into a really intense conversation before everything goes to Hell.
“See? It doesn’t change. It never changes. And I don’t die. I don’t. Nobody dies! ‘Cause everybody turns! Hey! Everybody turns!”
“Hey. What are you doing? You’ll ruin our chances of getting back to Hilltop.”
“Walkers! We’re surrounded!”
“Thing is, we’ve already killed you.”
Rick offers to let them come back to Hilltop, get seen by their doctor, and then let them leave. This marks a very big turning point for Rick, because he actively lies for the first time. The man who cuts him free when the walkers get into the bar, ends up dead by Rick’s hand.
When he goes back to the guy before he puts a final bullet in his head, the young man says that they could have lived together. This is probably something close to what Carl wrote in his letter, but it also sounds like something he said to the Governor in S4.
Morgan finally gets Jared where he wants him and watches as walkers eat him alive from the other side a collapsing gate.
When they’re outside, Rick asks Morgan why he helped in at the beginning. Why did he save him when he didn’t have to? He had his son there with him. Rick could have hurt them.
That’s when Morgan breaks down and tells him that he saved him BECAUSE Duane was there. Morgan wanted to show his son that there was still good in the world and that they needed to take are of people.
“You saved me. Morgan, you saved me. I would’ve died. Maybe on that street, right in front of your house. You didn’t know me. Why’d you do it?”
“We should go.”
“Just tell me. Why’d you save me? You had your son there.”
“No.”
“You did. Hey, no. Why’d you save me? Why?”
“Because…because my son was there.”
—
Jadis and Negan talk some as he gets ready to leave. She’s not really paying attention him, she’s looking at the photos. He tells her that he wouldn’t have burned her photos. When he offers her a place with him, she doesn’t accept.
He wants to know where the helicopter was from, but she doesn’t tell him, so he says that he’ll come back. This just goes to show how pissed off Negan is with Simon. He’s leaving Jadis and the helicopter plotline to go take care of him.
—-
Carol is in the woods and finds Henry who is yelling to be saved. It’s the same exact location as where Sophia was hidden by Rick during Season 2. Except this time, Carol is there to save the child.
They have an emotional reunion and Carol finds gets some closure when it comes to children in the apocalypse. She has saved one. She brings Henry back to Hilltop, and he runs to Ezekiel. Carol doesn’t say anything. Just walks past them both.
Later, Carol tells Ezekiel he was right and she was afraid, but he tells her:
“You are no coward.”
That’s when Carol tells him about Sophia. This is a bonding moment for them because when he opened up to her, she kept her story to herself. They’re holding hands, and Carol tells him that she’s not worried about finding herself anymore:
“I had a daughter. After I lost her, I was nothing, but the people I was with being with them I found myself. Some version of myself, a better self. Still, it always feels like it could just just be swept away again, but that doesn’t mean it will, and and it doesn’t mean that I couldn’t find myself again if it does.”
Rick and Morgan come back through the gates. Morgan walks up to Henry, reaches for his shoulder and smiles when he knows he’s alive and not a figment of his imagination.
He tells Henry he killed the man who killed his brother. That he ended it. Henry tells him that he’s sorry, and Morgan tells him to never be sorry.
Rick walks in the house without talking to anyone.
—-
Jadis goes back to her shipping crate and lays down on her bed. Who knows what she’s planning.
—
Negan drives toward the Sanctuary. He stops and tells someone to get in the car. We don’t know who it is either…
Negan gets back to the Sanctuary, and tells the Savior that meets him that he doesn’t want him to tell anyone that he’s back. He wants it to be a surprise.
Bye, Simon. Dwight, you have some explaining to do.
—
Back at Hilltop, Michonne goes to the room she shares with Rick. He apologizes for his behavior, and she tells him he doesn’t have to be sorry.
“I love you.”
“I love you, too.”
When she leaves the room, he gets Carl’s letter and reads it.
The Walking Dead airs Sundays on AMC at 9/8c!
