Okay, I’m bringin’ it, bringin’ it, bringin’ it back. I’m bringin’ it, bringin’ it back: FIRE BALL!!! Sorry for the Pitbull reference there. I meant to say that I’m bringing back the spoiler warning for this one because the shit really hit the fan on tonight’s episode. I don’t normally swear on my blog, but I’m making an exception for tonight because this was pretty heavy.

*Spoiler warning*

Now that I’ve effectively established I take no responsibility for spoiling major plot points for you; this episode was a very, very strong one. Not as epic as the season opener, but way more gut wrenching.

To summarize, after Rick ran over and shot the escaping cop, Father Gabriel brought a hoard of zombies from the school where the Termites were staying back to the church, Glenn and Maggie reunited with Carl and Michonne just in time to kill the walker hoard, and the plan for the exchanged mostly worked. After a lot of talking the Walking Dead Rescue Mission (hashtag) went down, but not as planned. The prisoners were exchanged, but Officer Dawn demanded to have Noah back since she lost Beth as her “ward”. Noah was about accept that offer, but Beth hugged Officer Dawn and then stabbed her with surgical scissors. What happened next made my jaw drop and my heart sink: Dawn shot Beth clean in the head, to which Daryl shot Dawn clean in the head back in retaliation.

What I liked: the coldness in which Rick dealt with the escaping officer, how we saw the internal struggles Dawn had over exercising her tyrannical rule on the hospital with that fight scene between Dawn and the other officer, the scene with the cops and Daryl and Sasha being snipers far away. Seeing Dawn get what she deserved was nice, I honestly thought she was more despicable than the Governor in some ways (namely how her narcissism made her believe she was saving people when she was actually enslaving them. At least the Governor was aware of how he hurt people.) Also, I hated that it had to happen, but this character death with Beth just created a huge tremor of emotion to millions of viewers (which hasn’t happened since Hershel died). That’s why this episode was great, because it created such a huge tremor in TWD fan community.

What I didn’t like: Not much aside from the huge amounts of talking and how the sub plot of rick shooting the escaped cop was used as a diversion to the real WTF moment in this episode rather than starting the conflict between the two groups. I’m also sad that I have to wait until February 2015 to see where Rick’s group goes next.  It will be interesting to see where the group goes from here.

And with that, I leave you with my new favorite EDM song: Prayer in C by Lily Wood and The Prick, which I dedicate to the Grady Memorial Cops for being the most annoying villains in Walking Dead history.

-Tatteybye