The Walking Dead Recap/Review: "Isolation"

Maya Zach ’17/ Emertainment Monthly Staff
Tyreese (Chad L. Coleman) is furious after discovering Karen and David’s bodies in this episode of The Walking Dead, “Isolation”. He demands that Rick    (Andrew Lincoln) find the perpetrator and bring him to justice. When Daryl        (Norman Reedus) and Rick try to calm him down, it just aggravates him further and ends with a tussle between him and Rick, with Rick being the clear victor. After losing Karen, Ty is scared that he will lose Sasha (Sonequa Martin-Green), as well, since she has been quarantined with a cough.
Sasha is not the only named character that has been infected with the influenza. This is The Walking Dead, after all, and there cannot be an episode without a serious threat to the lives of fan favorites. This week, Glenn is the one that has fans biting their lips. There are multiple shots of him keeled over and looking sickly, just to hammer in the fact that he is sick. Joining Glenn and Sasha in sickness is Lizzie, the elder of the two girls.
Hershel suggests that a veterinary school 50 miles away might not have been pillaged, so a team sets out to obtain some antibiotics. Daryl and Michonne (Danai Gurira) lead the team with Bob (Lawrence Gillard Jr.) and Tyreese helping out. When they hear a voice over the radio, they get distracted and drive off the road and are quickly overrun by walkers. Daryl, Michonne, and Bob bolt out of the car and into a clearing, while Ty sits in the car sullenly. By the time he gets out of the car, he is encircled by walkers, but somehow manages to make it out alive (though rather beaten up).
Back at the prison, the young and the old are quarantined, since they are the most likely to become infected. This doesn’t stop Hershel (Scott Wilson) from sneaking out to collect herbs for a tea to soothe the sick. Carl (Chandler Riggs) follows him out to protect him. When they encounter some “peaceful” walkers, Hershel stops Carl from killing them. Sound familiar? This is exactly how Dale dies in season two. Carl left a walker alive and it came back to kill the group’s moral center. It seemed as though Carl learned his lesson… When Maggie (Lauren Cohan) discovers that Hershel is not in quarantine, she is furious, but Hershel knows he is risking his life no matter what. He might as well do some good for those suffering rather than sit around and mope in isolation.
While Maggie has trouble coping, Beth (Emily Kinney) understands full well why her father is risking his life. Though she is incredibly upset, she appreciates what he is doing for the group. She tells Maggie that they don’t have the right to be upset; they just have to get over it. In this moment she acts like a young girl and an incredibly mature, intelligent woman. On one hand she refuses to deal with the information that she can’t handle, like a child; on the other hand, she is fully aware that he is doing everything that he can for the group, regardless of his own life, just as she is doing by taking care of Judith.
Rick knows that Carol (Melissa McBride) will do anything to protect her people, and when asked, she admits to having killed Karen and David. However, when Rick was investigating, he found a small bloody handprint near the scene. This print is much too small for Carol to have left; it had to be one of the kids. It seems incredibly unlikely that Carl would have committed such an act after his “rehabilitation.” This leaves Lizzie (Brighton Sharbino) and Mika (Kyla Kenedy), the girls that Carol decided to take care of. Is one (or both) of them capable of killing these two? If Carol found out, she would be willing to protect them and their secret. She would even be willing to take the blame, because as Ty says, she “cares”.  Maybe a little too much.
This episode has brought up two opportunities to bring in story lines from the comic book series. Comic book spoilers, ahoy! The people speaking on the radio could be Eugene, Abraham, and Rosita; whom AMC has already announced will be joining the show this season. And if one of the girls (Lizzie or Mika) is actually the killer, it could be related back to the comic book story of Ben and Billy. Ben began showing signs of being a psychopath rather early on, such as killing animals, and ended with him killing his twin brother, Billy. It is possible that either Mika or Lizzie are also showing signs of psychopathy.

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