'The Walking Dead' Recap: Meet Morgan's Friend, the Cheesemaker

Warning: This recap for the “Here’s Not Here” episode of The Walking Dead contains storyline and character spoilers.

Bad news: We still don’t have confirmation about Glenn’s death. Which could also be considered good news, in a Schrödinger’s Cat kinda way, because that means we can choose to believe he’s alive until we have concrete proof otherwise.

And more good news, once you get past the lack of a Glenn update, is that we finally got the episode we’ve been waiting for: the one in which we learn what Morgan was up to in the days post-“Clear,” and what turned him into the non-killing machine who tracked down his good friend Rick Grimes down all the way to Alexandria. It was an episode well worth the wait.

The Present

In Alexandria, after the events of “JSS” (the episode in which the Wolves attack the town), Morgan is talking to someone. We don’t see the face of that person, but Morgan is talking directly to him or her. “You said you want everything that I have… well, here it is, every last bit,” Morgan says, before he downloads his recent history.

The Past

Back in the apartment he lived in during Season 3’s “Clear,” Morgan is unhinged, yelling at someone — though no one else is there — while the apartment is on fire, via a lantern toppled over on the floor. “Here is not here,” and “You’re not here” are among the messages scrawled on the walls.

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Presumably because of the fire, we next see a dirty, frantic Morgan in the woods, wearing a helmet and carrying a rifle. He’s killing walkers and dragging their bodies onto a giant pile, which he sets ablaze. Aside from an occasional break for water, and to use a giant rock to sharpen a big stick into a stabbing implement, this sees to be Morgan’s obsession — the only thing he does all day, and night if a walkers happens by after dark.

The next day, he hears something in the woods and takes cover behind a tree. Two men — who might be a father and son, as Morgan will relate later — come running past him, and when they turn and see Morgan, he immediately jams his dagger stick through the man’s throat. The other one starts begging for his life, but Morgan knocks him to the ground and chokes him to death with his bare hands, yelling, “You go!” at him. They end up on his walker pile, and he uses blood from one of the bodies to write messages on his apocalyptic version of Pinterest: big rocks with words like “Here’s Not Here,” “Clear,” and “Pointless Acts” smeared on them.

Morgan walks further through the woods — stopping to yell at the non-visible beings that haunt him again — until he hears what sounds like a goat bleat. Further along, he sees an adorable goat, tied up to a post in the front yard of a pair of cabins, and when he approaches and starts to lift her leash off the post, a voice, from somewhere, addresses him. “Can you step away from the goat? She’s not yours. And I still need her. I’m still figuring out how to make cheese.”

Despite what sounds like a non-threatening voice, Morgan opens fire and begins skulking around the cabin, as the male voice continues to try to reason with him. Finally, Morgan turns around just in time to get smacked to the ground with a bo staff (!), and he wakes up a short time later inside a jail cell inside the cabin.

When the voice, of a man who will introduce himself as Eastman, asks Morgan his name, Morgan will only repeat the request “Kill me!” again and again, at ever-increasing volumes.

“That’s a stupid name,” Eastman wisecracks. “Dangerous. You should change it.” He tosses a small book, The Art of Peace by Morihei Ueshiba, into the cell. He tells Morgan the goat is named Tabitha, and he brings her into the cabin and puts her in a pen he’s built inside, so a walker won’t get her.

“You shot at me, I fed you,” Eastman says of the fresh tomato and cucumber slices and Goo Goo Cluster he put inside Morgan’s cell. “Please don’t hurt her.”

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The next morning, after Morgan looks through a window to see Eastman practicing aikido moves with his bo staff and using it to kill a roaming walker, Eastman makes what appears to be one of many unsuccessful attempts to whip up a tasty batch of cheese with Tabitha’s milk. He also begins telling Morgan about himself: He’s a forensic psychiatrist from Atlanta, who was employed by the state “to determine if certain people who did very bad things” were likely to be repeat offenders if released from jail. He still wants to know more about Morgan, like what he did, or what he does now.

“I clear,” Morgan says. “That’s why I’m still here.”

Eastman: “That’s the biggest load of horses–t I ever heard.” He goes on to tell Morgan that he has PTSD. And even after Morgan tells him he’s killed a lot of people, including some that weren’t threatening him, Eastman tells him he knows he’s saved people, too. “Pointless acts,” Morgan responds, but Eastman presses on, telling Morgan he knows he had children, and that he loved them a lot, “if you’re like this.” He guesses that Morgan saw his loved ones die, and that it’s caused him to be stuck in the moments of their deaths.

“I’m going to kill you!” Morgan says. “Because I have to clear.”

Eastman tells him he’s interviewed more than 825 people who did terrible things, and only one of them turned out to be evil. He then shares something big: The cell Morgan is in isn’t locked. Eastman threw the key in the river a while ago, so Morgan is free to go, or stay, but Eastman will not allow himself to be killed. Morgan steps out of the cell, and instead of digesting Eastman’s “prison of your own making” metaphor, he immediately tries to attack Eastman, who fights him off with his bo staff.

Morgan tries to choke him, but Eastman pins Morgan down instead. In the scuffle, Morgan broke a child’s drawing on a piece of drywall that hung on the wall of the cabin. When Eastman sees it broken in half, he angrily raises his staff at Morgan, before calming himself down almost as quickly. Morgan goes back into the cell and shuts the door. Eastman pushes it open, but a thoroughly dejected Morgan shuts it again.

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In another of his one-sided conversations with Morgan, Eastman talks about his daughter, who, after finding him in their garage crying one night — because of some of those more than 825 stories of terrible things he had to listen to — presented him with a rabbit’s-foot keychain she’d won at her school carnival that day. It was supposed to bring him good luck, and the next day, he found a flyer for an aikido class. He tells Morgan he should learn aikido; it will help him, for the trip they’re going to make, because it can’t just be the two of them.

After another attempt at a batch of cheese — “grassy notes are a little too Astroturf … but it has potential” — Eastman goes off to scavenge supplies, and Morgan sits in the cell, reading The Art of Peace,” until he has to run outside and save Tabitha from a walker attack. Morgan drags the dead zombie away, and finds Eastman near a graveyard with lots of markers. Eastman buries every walker he kills, after looking in their pockets for wallets. He uses their IDs to carve grave markers for each of them.

Back at the cabin, Eastman presents Morgan with a bo staff he made for him, and gives him his first aikido lesson. “It’s about redirecting, actually caring about the welfare of your opponent,” he tells Morgan. “You have to believe your life is precious … what we’ve done, we’ve done.”

Morgan, repeating what he’s learned: “We evade it by moving forward with a code to never do it again.”

Eastman’s Past

Back at the cabin enjoying dinner and a real conversation, Eastman unspools the rest of his story. The jail cell was not always in the cabin. He built it not long before the apocalypse. In his job, he was asked to evaluate a man named Creighton Dallas Wilton for parole. Wilton was a charming criminal, a true psychopath who had fooled everyone into thinking he was reformed. Everyone but Eastman.

And when Wilton realized that Eastman wasn’t fooled by him, he attacked him, and remained locked up, until he charmed people into getting him the tools he needed to escape prison, followed by a trip to Eastman’s house, where he killed Eastman’s wife, daughter, and son. He immediately turned himself into a nearby police station, stating the sole reason he had escaped was so he could ruin Eastman’s life.

A destroyed Eastman built the cell in the cabin, with plans to bust Wilton out of jail himself, take him to the cabin cell, and wait as the serial killer starved to death.

Did he do it? Morgan wants to know.

“I have come to believe all life is precious,” Eastman says.

Morgan and Eastman head into the woods, to Morgan’s clearing spot, for supplies Morgan left behind, and Morgan is shaken when Eastman asks him to share the names of the loved ones he lost. Still shaken, Morgan has to take down an approaching walker, but freezes when he sees the walker’s face: it’s the young man he choked to death with his bare hands before meeting Eastman. Eastman pulls Morgan out of the way, but not before the walker takes a big bite of Eastman’s back.

Morgan and Eastman then get into a fight, Morgan upset that he’s about to lose this new friend, but pretending he’s upset because Eastman stepped in instead of allowing him to kill the walker. Eastman leaves on his own, pulling the walker body back to the graveyard.

A short time later, Morgan walks back towards the cabin and spots a walker. He kills it just as it is going to attack a young couple. Is he back in his “Clear” frame of mind? No, he allows them to move on, and he gets back to the cabin to find Tabitha being eaten by a walker.

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He takes the bodies of Tabitha and the walker to the graveyard, where Eastman is fading fast. Morgan tells Eastman to sit down, and he walks towards into the graveyard, where he notices one of the markers read “Creighton Dallas Wilton.”

Eastman did it: He kidnapped Wilton, took him to the cabin, and spent 47 days watching him starve to death. Not caring what happened to himself after that, he went back to Atlanta to turn himself in, and discovered there was no one to turn himself into, because apocalypse. He went back to the cabin — after stopping at his house to cut out the piece of drywall his daughter had drawn on — and found peace only after realizing killing Wilton hadn’t helped him at all and deciding he’d never kill again.

By now close to death, Eastman tells Morgan, “You can stay here … for the rest of your life, you could stay here, but you shouldn’t stay here. If you stay here, you’ll be alone … everything is about people.” Eastman gives him his rabbit’s foot, and tells him, “I hope it’s lucky for you, too, whatever you decide.”

“I’ve decided,” Morgan says, practicing his aikido more and heading out of the woods, past Eastman’s grave, and to a set of railroad tracks. Beside the tracks, there’s a sign, directing people to Terminus.

The Present

The person Morgan has just shared his story with: a Wolf, actually the big, bad Wolf it appeared he might have killed at the end of “JSS.” The Wolf is tied up, sitting on the floor of a basement apartment in one of the Alexandria buildings. “That’s it, every last bit,” Morgan tells him.

“You think it could work out that way with me?” the Wolf asks.

“Yes, I think it can.”

“Maybe. You noticed I’m shaking a little? Sweating a little?” the Wolf asks. He lifts the front of his shirt, revealing an infected wound. “I saw how settled this place was in pictures I found,” he continues. “I thought maybe there’d be something here. Medicine to help this. But that was before you people won. So, I know, I’m probably going to die. But if I don’t, I am going to have to kill you, Morgan. I’m going to have to kill every person here. Every one of them. Children, too. Just like your friend Eastman’s children. Those are the rules. That’s my code.”

Morgan leaves the Wolf alone in the room, leaves the apartment, and locks the door behind him, just as voices — including one that sounds like Rick — are shouting for someone to open the gate.

Zombie Bites:

* Lennie James as Morgan and John Carroll Lynch (yep, Twisty the Clown) as Eastman should get Emmy nominations for this episode. That is all.

* R.I.P. Tabitha the goat. Going all the way back to Rick’s horse in Season 1, animals fare worse in the apocalypse than the Alexandrians, which is saying a lot.

* It’s still perplexing that the SpaghettiOs people wouldn’t allow The Walking Dead to use their product in Season 4’s “Live Bait” — remember, Tara and her family share their “Sketti Rings” with The Governor? — so good for the Goo Goo Cluster folks for allowing Eastman to enjoy the real thing, and not Ga Ga Nugget, or some equally ridiculously named knock-off.

* Eastman told Morgan he knew he was going to hold a baby again. Remember him and Judith, on Rick’s porch, in the Season 6 premiere? Nice.

O.K., Dead-heads, let’s hear your reactions to “Here’s Not Here”: Was Morgan’s backstory as rich and satisfying as you’d hoped it would be? Were you wishing Eastman had survived, so he could join up with Rick’s group at some point, too? Do you think Morgan has a chance of Eastman-ing the Big Bad Wolf? And if he can’t make the Wolf see things his way, how many people do you think might die in the process?

The Walking Dead airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on AMC.