Cherokee Rose

SPOILER ALERT. If you haven't seen this week's episode of "The Walking Dead," read no further.

Now that Carl seems to be on the mend, and the others have arrived from the highway, the group at Herchel's farm hold a funeral for Otis. When Otis' widow asks Shane to speak, he is almost overcome with guilt, but manages to make his through a lie at the cairn they've built in Otis' memory.

Dale asks Maggie about water and she tells him there are several wells, pointing him to the one they use for the cattle and assuring him it's just as pure as the house well.  Daryl heads out to search for Sophia on his own, finding an abandoned house where she may have spent the night and an unusual flower growing outside.

Meanwhile, T-Bone and Dale are drawing water from the well when Dale looks in it and stops T-Bone from drinking a big ladle of water. It seems there is a 'swimmer' in the well - a bloated, water-logged Walker trapped at the bottom. Deciding that shooting the Walker will contaminate the well (if it isn't already), they try to lure it with a canned ham on a rope. When that doesn't work, they send Glenn down as live bait but the pump they're using as to hold the rope gives way and Genn is sent plunging down the well. They work feverishly to haul Glenn up and find that he managed to lasso the Walker, anyway. They pull the Walker up but it gets stuck halfway out and the bloated corpse rips in half, sending legs and offal back down where it came from, leaving the upper half to claw at them. T-Bone smashes the Walker's head in as Maggie turns away in disgust.

Glenn and Maggie are sent to retrieve medicine from the local pharmacy (and a special request from Lori), where the two have a very intimate moment ("You're not the only one who's lonely," Maggie tells him). Herchel tells Rick that once they find Sophia and Carl is well-enough to travel, they must leave but Rick later passionately entreats him to let the travelers stay. Herchel agrees to think about, if they all follow his rules (something I don't think will happen). 

Daryl brings a flower back to Carol, telling her the story of the Cherokee Rose, which supposedly grew from the tears of the Native American women on the infamous Trail of Tears, in an attempt to comfort her over the still-missing Sophia. Glenn and Maggie return and Lori sneaks off in the night to use the item she asked Glenn to be discreet about. It's a pregnancy test, which confirmed what I thought Jenner whispered into Rick's ear just before they escaped the CDC.

With only one (exceptionally gross) Walker kill and lots of sturm und drang, "Cherokee Rose" was an interesting though less-than-exciting episode (unless you count Daryl exploring the very creepy abandoned house). But I have faith that they're setting us up for some heart-pounding drama to end the demi-season. Much is being made online about how slowly the story is being told. Personally, I think that's a good thing. It only makes the major moments that much better and sets up some major plot twists yet to come.

"The Walking Dead" isn't the kind of show that resolves an issue every hour. Like "Lost;" "The Sopranos" and "Breaking Bad," it's taking its time to deliver major plot-point reveals so that when they do come, they are all that much more effective. Would you prefer that Scarlett learns everything about Rhett in the first 20 minutes of Gone With the Wind? I thought not.

More, anon.

Prospero