NOTE: Let’s be mindful of all the new viewers participating in this conversation and try not to spoil plot points taking place deep into the run of the comic series. Mild speculation is fine and encouraged, as well as talking about things that have happened in the comic up until the point they are at in the show, but don’t get too explicit with regard to future surprises. They will be deleted. Thanks!
“18 Miles Out”
or
“Knives Are For Stabbing Zombies, Not Suicide”
Shane’s being chased by zombies. And it looks like it could be a nightmare about his time with Otis until Rick shows up sporting a rugged beard and, honestly, Shane’s not going to give him one of those in his dream. If it was Shane’s dream, Rick would run around in circles sobbing like a little kid with a skinned knee until he was descended on by a pack of zombies and torn limb from limb. Shane would watch this all while having a threesome with Lori and Andrea.
Roll credits!
On an idyllic road on a peaceful day, Rick and Shane pull get out of a car, locked and loaded for trouble. It seems that it’s been a week since the last episode and it’s time for them to have “The Talk”. Shane starts to think that he’s already knows how babies are born, and that Lori knows all about it, until Rick reveals that he knows that Shane murdered Otis. Shane explains that it was all about hard choices, saving Carl, being a hard man who does what needs doing in troubled zombie times, etc. Rick says he understands but he’s a hard man who does what needs doing in troubled zombie times too and that Shane needs to understand that Rick is with Lori and it’s time for him to move on. Instead of agreeing so they can move on with their day, and ignoring the fact that Rick is armed, Shane decides to tell Rick the story of how he fell in love with Lori and how he didn’t mean for it to happen.
Smash cut to Rick popping the trunk of the car to find Randall, their new hostage from Dave and Joe from Philly’s camp, tied up and gagged.
Back at the house, Maggie commiserates with Lori about the stupidity of their menfolk. Glenn blames Maggie for his freezing during last week’s gun fight. Lori tells Maggie that she has nothing to apologize for but to be on the safe side, never tell Glenn to “man up.”
Rick and Shane are back on the road having a conversation that I’ve never had with any of my friends, a conversation that begins with, “We’ve got to start using our knives more.” They’ve got to go into ammo conservation mode. They’ve also got to start hoarding supplies for the coming winter. (Aren’t they in Georgia?) Rick hopes that the winter will affect the zombies and that maybe after winter is through, it will be a different world. Shane contributes to the conversation like a sullen teenager on a road trip with an eager parent. He stares out the passenger window, nods nigh imperceptibly, and manages to mutter, “Sounds good.”
That Random Blonde Chick still isn’t dead. Lori brings her some food and says that they should go take a walk. The Random Blonde Chick speaks! She uses the opportunity to ask Lori how she can get pregnant. Maybe Rick should have The Talk with her? Oh, it’s an accusatory question. Well, then. Awkward.
(I feel like random blonde chick is not long or this world.)
Back on the road Shane notices that Rick has traveled further than 18 miles, which was the agreed upon distance from the farm to dump Randall. Rick’s looking for a place to give the kid a shot at surviving. Shane would just as soon test Rick’s new knife strategy on Randall. Rick spots something and pulls over. Long, chain link fence topped by barbed wire? IS IT THE PRISON? Nope, it’s the Mert County Department of Public Works. Rick and Shane get out of the car to have a look see and Rick decides that this would be a good place to dump Randall. They spot a lone zombie on the other side of the fence and Shane pulls his gun ready to drop it. Rick reminds Shane of the new knife strategy and cuts his hand so he can use the fresh blood to beckon the zombie over so he can stab it in the head, which he does. Another zombie appears and Shane gets to do the stabby honors.
Inside the public works compound, Shane and Rick find a lot of used up food and supplies and the charred corpses of Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru. Shane examines the two dead zombies and finds no evidence of bite marks. Maybe some scratches, but nothing obvious indicating how these poor security guards got turned into zombies. Also, this is the place from the cold open which means zombies, and lots of them, are lurking. Oh well, time to cut Randall loose!
Lori check on the the Random Blonde Chick (RBC) again and finds her crying about how pointless life is now. I feel like it’s time to put her on 24-hour suicide watch. Down in the kitchen, Lori discovers that the knife that she brought with RBC’s food is missing. (Also, it didn’t look like RBC ate any of the food.) She runs back up and find RBC huddled under the blanket with the knife. Lori takes it back from RBC and then goes outside to tell Andrea to find Maggie and/or Hershel because they’ve got a situation brewing.
Rick and Shane dump Randall on the grounds of the public works with only a knife that he’ll have to use somehow to cut his binds. Randall starts using what he learned in Hostage Survival 101 (he audited the class sophomore year at Georgia Tech) and stars blabbering on about his life before the zombies in the hopes that they won’t leave him to die. Rick and Shane are immune to his pleas until Randall reveals that he went to high school with Maggie. Uh oh. Now we’ve got trouble. He knows Maggie which means he knows where the farm is. Shane takes a shot at Randall that only misses by a few inches because Rick knocks him over. Rick tells Shane that he needs a night to think over killing Randall. From this decision, Shane extrapolates that Rick has gone soft, too soft to protect Lori and Carl.
Commence alpha male fisticuffs.
While Rick and Shane pound on each other, Randall crawls for the knife. Shane briefly gains the upper hand in the fight and pulls a gun to shoot Randall before he’s subdued by Rick again who punches Shane a once, twice, and then a third time and the third one is wet. Rick stumbles away from Shane and tells him that he doesn’t get to decide who lives and who dies. Shane, bleeding profusely from the mouth, grabs a giant wrench and chucks it in Rick’s general direction. The throw is high and wide and smashes through a window. We see Shane in the reflection of a shard of glass and, bloody and bruised, he looks like a zombie himself. We don’t have time to ponder that, however, because the zombies from the cold open come pouring out of the broken window like so many clowns from a car!
Back at the house Maggie berates RBC for contemplating suicide. I guess she’s Maggie’s younger sister?
Back to the public works facility that now resembles a Benny Hill sketch, zombies chase Shane and Rick around the compound. Randall frees himself and takes enthusiastic glee in Rick’s new knife fighting technique.
At the house, Lori and Andrea can’t help but over hear the screaming match between Maggie and RBC. Andrea and Lori get into a tiff of their own. Andrea advocates letting RBC make her own decisions, even if they’re suicidal. Lori, in true Rick’s wife fashion, wants to take a more… controlling interest in what happens in the group. And then they get into an argument about who does the more important chores: Lori’s laundry or Andrea’s guard duty? We’ll never find out the answer because Andrea’s pointed reference to Lori having found a boyfriend in the zombie apocalypse ends the conversation right quick.
Rick, still running from a pack of zombies, spots his gun under a car. He lunges for it, grabs it, and picks of two zombies before being overrun by a third. All three zombies fall on top of Rick, and it gets really awkward as Rick can’t get an angle on the zombie with his gun, and the zombie can’t reach Rick. All that’s left is some very vigorous and unsexy dry humping, until Rick decide to stick his gun into the mouth of the first zombie to shoot through the back of its head to kill the third.
Maggie and RBC are still debating suicide until RBC hits on a genius idea: a double suicide pact! They can kill each other and be done with it! RBC is ready to die tonight!
Back at the public works compound, Shane manages to use his own body to barricade himself into a school bus. The zombies still want in, though, and are starting push the door in, so Shane cuts HIS hand and smears it on the door frame (he’s going to need a tetanus shot) so that the zombies will focus on that while he focuses on stabbing them in the head.
At the house Andrea busts in on this little suicide party and tells Maggie that she can’t watch over RBC forever and that she’ll take a shift watching her. With Maggie gone, Andrea tells RBC that “the pain never goes away, you just make room for it,” and then she leaves. Geez, she might as well have shot RBC in the head herself.
Rick runs into Randall at the public works brouhaha. Randall tries to convince Rick to leave Shane behind since he’s currently drawing the attention of all the zombies, plus he’s a dick. Rick thinks it over and then drags Randall away from the bus and outside the fence of the compound. Shane sees this, of course, and is none too happy.
Maggie returns from washing up and finds RBC (or Beth, whatever) holed up in the bathroom. She hears glass shatter. Lori appears and helps Maggie pry the door open to find Beth has smashed the mirror and has cut her wrist.
Rick isn’t done with Shane yet! Back at the car he loots the two original zombies of their guns and ammo. Then he stares hard at the two uniformed zombies and clearly makes parallels to himself and Shane. Awww.
Back at the bus, Shane is in trouble because his knife got stuck in the head of one of the zombies and he couldn’t get it back. All hope is lost until the car appears with Randall behind the wheel and Rick hanging out the passenger window, gun’s a-blazing! They pull up to the back of the bus where Shane escapes out the back door and into the car! Shane looks equally happy to be alive and annoyed that he can’t hold being abandoned to zombies over Rick.
Maggie is a mite pissed off at Andrea for abandoning RBC to suicide, but Andrea is thrilled that her little mind game worked and that the suicide attempt wasn’t successful. RBC chose life. The cuts weren’t deep and RBC is getting stitched up off camera by Dr. Hershel, Medicine Man, whom the producers don’t have to pay for this episode.
Back on the road, Randall is still not a trusted member of the group because he is once again tied up in the back of the car. Rick tells Shane that they might still have to kill Randall, but he’s still going to have to take a night to decide because, even after all they’ve been through, killing a man should be no easy decision. Rick then tells Shane that it’s time for him to come back into the trust circle and follow his leadership.
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This was an intense episode. Lots of action, lots of craziness. Some epic Zombie kills….i kept feeling like we were in Mortal Kombat with lots of fatality moves. Really liked it. That sequence where Shane throws the wrench through the window and saw his reflection…he TOTALLY looked like a zombie. Foreshadowing?
Also, in this world, i’m amazed that germs and infections don’t exist….all that cutting with dirty knives and not only does the bleeding stop within 2 seconds, their hand doesn’t get all gang greene-y and fall of. crazy!
Shane’s reflection was very creepy. I want to think these two have sorted their issues out…or at least for now, but I doubt Shane has learned his lesson from this little escapade.
yeah i dunno about Shane. He might have gotten back in the car, but i don’t think he’s back on board. Shane still wants to be Alpha dog and he still wants Lori and Carl. I think that last scene where he’s looking out the window and sees the lone walker says a lot about his mental state. I’m calling it….Shane is on borrowed time!
The knife thing seems like a bad idea all around.
I think the silent killing is a good idea, messing up your hand to do it is a bit silly
Cutting your own hand always seemed completely ridiculous to me whenever they do it for any reason. It is really difficult to heal skin that is always moving/flexing. I never understood it. And to top it off, lots of nerves there. But it’s probably for budgetary reasons that they always do it, as palms do not get a lot of air time.
Why stab THROUGH the skull?? Eye sockets are much easier. Of course Shane lost his knife doing something stupid like that.
Once Michonne shows up, she’ll show ’em how it’s done.
Actually @MisterJ, and I doubt this is going through their minds but still, if the cuts are kept fairly shallow, the palms of our hands heal very quickly, because the cells are replaced very quickly. You’ll notice a tendency for most places on our bodies to hold scars, while the palm of the hand generally does not (for the same reason.) There is also a quick tendency to develop calluses, just ask any guitar player. Additionaly, our palms also house nice fatty pads for cushioning, so it’s a lot safer to cut the there rather than, say, the back of the hand which predominately just has a layer of skin between you and some pretty important bits. If you don’t believe me pinch the back of your hand then pinch the palm of your hand and compare.
Maggie, please don’t spend any time with Lori, her crazy might rub off on you. You deal with the Glen situation your own way, it’ll work out.
While Lori is the obvious crazy person, I prefer her to Andrea. I don’t even like Andrea enough to want to see her die. If she just stopped appearing in the show, I’d never question. To put it in context though I love Andrea in the book, she is my of my favourite woman in comics. I have an Adlard sketch that I treasure of her, and this character pales in comparison.
Agreed.
I’ve never wanted to punch someone as much as i wanted to punch Andrea in this episode. I thought this was a really good episode, by far the best since the pilot (my opnion), and the only thing that stopped it from being a great episode was Andrea and her “let it be” thinking. I’m not sure if this scene was poorly written or the writers are trying to demonstrate how stupid Andrea is, but I am going with the former.
I hope the writers recognise how stupid their Andrea is. If this was meant to be an intelligent debate about how to deal with someone in Beth’s situation it fell short. I imagine there are different was to deal with suicide, but Andreas approach was poorly thoughht out. She thinks she’s tough, like Shane, but without his experience to back it up.
I agree…it’s a shame she’s not the Andrea from the book
Truth
As far as andrea goes, I guess when Shane rubs off on you, he really rubs off on you….
So so true. This is the only departure from the book that disturbs me, because book Andrea was one of my favorite characters. This episode actually put me in the position of siding with Lori OVER Andrea and that makes me incredibly uncomfortable.
Agreed
@itsbecca – I know what you mean, if your siding with Lori the other person must be dire
rick and shane need to patch up the bro mance like before the zombie crazyness
this was unquestionably the best episode yet for me.
i’m right there with you.
I think the greatest thing this episode did was set it one week later, and was a great way for Marraza (sp) to sperate his run from Darabonts. Really loved the themeatic walkers, the lone walker in the field and Shane looking like he wanted to go after it, then not on the way back, and the two police walkers that they have to silently kill.
Why was Shane so interested in the two bodies that hadn’t been bitten? Is this something to do with the everyone’s already infected theory.
that is a good theory i hope that goes into the series
I think that has something to do with it, but i thouht it was a great way to show the differneces between Rick and Shane, where as Rick doesn’t quite pay attention to these questions and looks for the simplest answer. i.e. it must have been the scratches.
Most likely. I thought the same thing.
With all the zombie blood and gore flying around when they kill them, it’s hard to understand why everyone’s not already infected. Ricks face was covered in zombie blood and you would assume it got in his mouth and eyes and absorbing through the skin and what not.
@cromulent– SERIOUSLY i’m thinking the same thing each weekI!!!! all that nasty black blood flying all over the place, with their open wounds. Its easier to catch a cold than it is to get turned into a zombie in the WD universe!
I too was wondering about all that gore all over Rick, plus with his sliced open palm. I’m going with the “everyone’s already infected” theory, since it appears that if you die by any means, you come back a zombie. I don’t think it’s necessary to be bitten and have that be the cause of your death. Think about the one that they found hanging from a noose. Seems likely that person died from the hanging, not a zombie bite.
the big horror of this show for me, is it attacks my natural germaphobic instincts. “C’mon Rick…just wash your hands first…why is no one grabbing the Purell!?!?!” kinda things. =)
Seeing as Glen and Rick spread gore all over themselves early on in the series, I think we’ve established that the infection cannot spread that way.
The everyone’s already infected theory is possible, though not definitive. The noose guy could’ve decided to kill himself after being bitten.
It’s great to see the evolution of these characters. The once all accepting group that showed compassion has embraced isolationism and now drops a kid in the middle of nowhere with nothing but a knife. It’s crazy how far they’ve come which is a characteristic of a great show.
@Zeppo: That’s the way it is in the comic. You die, you become a zombie. Happened to S.
I’m done with this show. It feels like almost every decision anyone makes is stupid, the development and progression feels poorly paced, and I just don’t care about anyone right now. I’ll just stick with the comic.
This episode ranks up there with one of the best so far. I really enjoyed seeing things come to a head with Shane and Rick. Now in my mind Rick is as “bad ass” as Shane has ever been. Rick gets right to the heart of their shared problem and puts it in no uncertain terms in true “John Wayne” fashion about what needs to be done. You could feel the tension and betrayal right from the first punch.
Seriously, they need to get off the damn farm. Good episode though.
I want them to get off the farm also… but I realised that a lot of character development is taking place as it is a “new” environment (especially with Shane). I’ve accepted that character development probably wouldn’t be as convincing if the tv show had an “accelerated” pace like the comic.
The TV version of Rick is a whiny bi–h.
Shane and the guy with the bow and arrow (forgot his name) are the only two characters who have done anything of substance to keep the people safe.
Word.
Wasn’t Randall supposed to lose his leg? I must have missed something because I would think you would need more than a week before you are walking around after your leg got so badly messed up.
All in all, a great episode and I really appreciated the narrower focus – but that leg thing bothered me.
“We can lock him up in the barn. That is, unless you bust it open!”
ZING!
Lol
love the parallel between the lone walker shane sees out of the window and how his life will become without the group, just a solitary man wandering aimlessly alone and eventually bitten… at the end when he sees him again it is like, “yeah, that was a close one, glad Rick’s not a dick and left me behind like i would have him.”
If Shane is just as much a dick next week, I don’t know….
Good episode, but Shane needs to get it, and soon. And I hate to say it, but Andrea does too. Definitely not the Andrea from the comics. She could redeem herself in my eyes by not being as pissed off at Dale and by forsaking Shane, but I don’t see that happening unless it’s just for the sake making the character more like the one in the comic, and I wouldn’t want them to do it for that reason. So yeah, kill her.
At this point, kill everyone but Shane, Glen, and…redneck bow guy. They’re all terrible.
How does Randall know he was at Maggie’s farm? Lucky guess.
He probably recognized her dad. It’s a small town, how many kids have parents that own a farm and are also veterinarians? can’t be that many
The drama is real. But the realism is not. Too many improbable things happen in the show (short recovery period from surgery or from getting your leg skewerd). It’s a good show, but even the most “realistic” shows (Breaking Bad)require a suspension of belief. I started enjoying television more after accepting that.
Man, I really feel like I am missing out on this show! I watched the first season, but for some unknown reason, didn’t watch season 2.
Great episode. Nice to see some loose threads being legit dealt with instead if debated like a Senate quorum call. One nitpick is about the whole cut your hand to attract the zombies strategy. Are the zombies going to ignore people without cut hands?
“I was going to bite that dude, but he doesn’t have blood pouring from his hands. I’ll go wander through the wheat field near the highway instead.”