The Walking Dead recap: 'East'

Near the conclusion of Sunday night's "East," Rick and Morgan's search for the departed Carol reaches a hilltop farmhouse, where the appearance of a stranger in the midst of a potentially deadly scuffle with a handful of walkers stops them in their tracks. As always, when a stranger appears on The Walking Dead, the same fraught question emerges: What should we do?

Recalling the member of the Wolves — an anarchic band of survivors — who sacrificed his own life to save Denise in "No Way Out" — Morgan explains his code of ethics to Rick. On the one hand is his conviction that "we all can change." On the other is his belief that it’s "all a circle. Everything gets a return."

Can both of those ideals exist in one person? That Morgan’s argument for the preservation of life should feature two distinct, even contradictory, notions of human endeavor — one rooted in transformation, one in recurrence — is a reflection of Sunday's episode of The Walking Dead, and of the entire sixth season. In "East," the tension between the urge to move forward and the need to look back threatens to tear Alexandria and its residents to pieces.

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The opening flash-forward, which depicts events from the middle of the episode's narrative, sketches this conflict in violent terms: a round hole in a car's windshield, a blood-drenched spear, Carol's cross abandoned on the gravel. From these images, "East" immediately wrings suspense over Carol’s fate.

But in a larger sense, these images cast neutrality as an untenable stance. When we later learn that this gruesome scene is the result of her confrontation with a group of Saviors, Carol says, "I'm not really from anywhere. I'm not really going anywhere." It’s an attitude she can hardly expect to maintain. In the world of The Walking Dead, shattered into warring fiefdoms, there is no such thing as an impartial position. Each faction's first instinct is, "You're either with us, or you're against us."

That this is also Rick's worldview — his attempt to shoot the man at the farmhouse is thwarted only by Morgan's intervention — points to the blurriness of such a distinction. As we heard in Carol's letter at the end of "Twice as Far," the conflation of loving one's brethren and killing for them is too much for her to bear, and her flight from Alexandria — to the tune of Johnny Cash's "It's All Over" — shows the damage that Rick has wrought by pushing the townspeople toward ruthlessness at every turn. The Alexandrians have the porch swings and front lawns of a civilized society, but under Rick's de facto leadership they've become more like the Saviors than they look. It’s an ethos that the episode symbolizes as Rick takes an arrogant bite of the apple, reveling not in the fruits of their labor but the spoils of battle.

Carol's decision to leave — like Daryl's determination to find the Saviors who murdered Denise — may be foolish, but Morgan's monologue in "East" at least introduces the idea that Rick's realpolitik is shortsighted. (After all, Morgan says, had the once-nefarious Wolf not come to Denise's rescue, she wouldn't have been there to save Rick's son, Carl, from the gunshot wound to his eye.) When even the hard-hearted Daryl is acting based on emotion and not strategic advantage — fingering the keychain Denise plucked from the apothecary in "Twice as Far" — it's clear that amoral pragmatism is an insufficient foundation for "the next world."

If these developments, following two forceful, focused episodes, seem designed to set up an explosive season finale rather than stand on their own, "East" nonetheless establishes the terms of the reckoning with precision. With Maggie in painful, premature labor and Alexandria's gates undermanned, Morgan sends Rick home, planning to continue the search for Carol on his own. Meanwhile, Daryl is captured, along with Rosie, Glenn, and Michonne — a quartet, worryingly, of the town's most skilled fighters.

The real work of the season's penultimate episode, however, is to demonstrate that no amount of firepower or physical prowess is enough to overwhelm the human instinct for love, or connection, or understanding. To resist sentiment may seem, to Rick as to the Saviors, a source of strength, but the inner turmoil it causes soon metamorphoses into weakness. Losing sight of the fact that "all life is precious," as Morgan says, is no solution to the plight of The Walking Dead's remaining survivors: Those who cling to the notion that might makes right may end up living the longest in this brutal, apocalyptic landscape, but in a way they're already zombies.