The Grove
Righto, so the shit really hits the fan in Season 4, Episode 14, entitled The Grove of AMC’s The Walking Dead! Here’s what went down:
SPOILERS COMMENCE IMMEDIATELY…
Lizzie fucking Borden is what went the fuck down!
Yeah, while fans of The Walking Dead comics had already pegged Lizzie (Brighton Sharbino) as filling the shoes of the good twin/bad twin story line, fans of the TV show were probably more than a little rattled with this episode.
So we start off with Tyreese (Chad Coleman), Carol (Melissa McBride), Judith, Lizzie and Mika (Kyla Kenedy) following the tracks, on their way to the mystical-but-surely-not-Woodbury town, ominously, called Terminus. On the way they stop to look for water and low and behold they come across the perfect little oasis in the form of a fairly self-sufficient cottage.
Carol spends a lot of this episode bearing the heavy burden of listening to Tyreese pine for Karen (Melissa Ponzio), keeping her eye on a fire (is it Daryl (Norman Reedus) and Beth’s (Emily Kinney) handy work they can smell?), worrying that Mika is going to go the way of her own daughter, Sophia (Madison Lintz) and then becoming increasing concerned with where Lizzie’s brain is at.
Tyreese and Carol agree to settle down in this newly found utopia rather than head into Terminus – even if it is obvious Carol will struggle living with Tyreese unless she spills her guts about killing Karen and David(Brandon Carroll).
It all seems like a good idea at first, but like every good thing in The Walking Dead, eventually it turns into a bloodbath. This time it is Lizzie’s turn to go off the deep end and for the first time we get to watch a character make a complete turn from good to bad.
Lizzie starts ‘playing’ chasey with zombies, feeding them rats and trying to convince everyone that she can truly understand zombies. ‘They just want to make us like them,‘ is her logic. Finally we know for certain that Lizzie was behind the weird rat art going down at the prison and we are fast tracked into realising that she honestly believes that walkers are still people too.
And so the downward spiral continues.
There are some interesting conversations for Carol to be had, mostly in a bid to lead the viewer up to the point where Lizzie finally goes all bat shit crazy and guts the hell out of her little sister, Mika. Apparently she wants her sister to turn so that everyone can see that Lizzie’s beliefs are true. And if the grown ups hadn’t returned just in the knick of time, Judith would have been next up on the chopping board!
It is at this point that Tyreese and Carol decide that Lizzie ‘can’t be around people’ and Carol takes her out to ‘look at the flowers’ and once more poor old Carol is tasked with doing what has to be done…
“Just look at the flowers dear…”
Tough love, Carol-style
As a result, their new found utopia has now been tainted, and once Carol fesses up to killing Karen, there is nothing more to do than head on to Terminus.
Honestly, while I completely LOVED this episode and found myself hanging on every single word uttered, the more I think about this episode – in hindsight – the more I find myself questioning it.
Realistically, it felt like AMC were cramming Lizzie’s whole downward spiral into insanity into just the one episode. Yes, we know Lizzie is a psycho, yet, other than giving the zombies names when we are first introduced to her character, at times it feels like the menace of Lizzie builds based on nothing more than smoke and mirrors.
So, what did you think of Episode 14 of The Walking Dead? Did you think Lizzie unravelled right on track, or do you think AMC fast tracked it just for this episode? Let me know in the comments below.
You can read my Episode 15 recap here.
(Photo Credits: AMC/Talking Dead)
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Rachel Tsoumbakos 
Lizzie and Mica were based upon two characters from the GN, twin boys named Bobby and Ben, who first showed up in Issue #2. After everyone left the Prison Ben started losing his mind, though there was evidence he was going crazy before the Woodbury attack. The line Lizzie spoke–“It’s okay. I didn’t hurt her brains”–was the same thing Ben said after the adults discovered what he’d done.
It’s interesting, but the “Look at the flowers” scene was pretty much take straight from “Of Mice and Men”, where George kills Lennie after it’s discovered he’d killed Mae. George was getting them to talk about the farm they always wanted to buy, and how Lennie wanted to raise rabbits–which, if you remember a little bit of foreshadowing, Lizzie killed those bunnies while everyone was resting in the wood, which was what Lennie would do while petting them–and George is telling him to look across the river and see the farm right before he shoots him in the back of the head. Given that Carol was reading classics to the kids at the prison, there’s a little bit of symmetry there.
Bobby and Ben – thanks, for the life of me I could remember their names! And, wow, I haven’t read Of Mice and Men, so your extra insight is awesome Cassidy 😀
When I saw the characters at the beginning of the season I figured them to be the twins, and as time went on I knew they were. I was telling everyone early on not to get attached to the girls, ’cause it was gonna end in tears.
I was doing the same thing! Of course I couldn’t help myself and grew attached to Mika 😦
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I’m not generally squeamish and I do try to keep an open mind, but I found this episode extremely unpleasant and totally unbelievable. I also know nothing about childhood psychosis, but the idea that a pre-teen young girl would murder her own sister and in such a brutal manner, is beyond belief.
It is something that rarely happens, but it is not completely unheard of. I think, in this instance, her mental instability was probably already there but was heightened dramatically due to the extreme conditions she was now presented with. Losing your parents and having to deal with people who have died yet rise again like they are living is probably very hard to process, especially more so to someone who may have been unbalanced to begin with.
However, I just found they left precious little in previous episodes leading up to this episode in the way of Lizzie spiralling downwards.
Oh, and then Carol shooting Lizzie in the back of the head.
Bonkers!
Hell YEAH!!!!
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So the ethical code that Rick put forward ‘We don’t kill our own’ (sic), seems to have flown out the window for some, mainly Carol.
I actually like Carol, but I don’t know why.
I LOVE the Carol character. To see her rise up above her abusive husband is great. To see her go beyond and not quite know when to reign it all in is pretty cool too 🙂
Completely agree with you about Rick though. I think Rick sees everything too personally and tries to fix things to make everyone happy rather than seeing the bigger picture like Carol does. I think they are both extremes of the spectrum.
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this episode was fucking shit like real i have 7 siblings and i only know of one that would do that and he has been a sico so that is that
fucking a this is just shit so just ya know i cried for days after that
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