‘The Walking Dead’ Recap: Of Weevils and War
Warning: This recap for the “Bury Me Here” episode of The Walking Dead contains spoilers.
A quick opening scene hints at some imminent heartbreak, as King Ezekiel somberly oversees the loading of a single cantaloupe into a truck usually used for the delivery of offerings to the Saviors. But we don’t know just how crushing the season’s 13th episode will be, as two Kingdom dwellers will be dead, and a trio of characters who wanted to avoid fighting at all costs have to finally acknowledge there’s just no peace to be kept when it comes to living under the thumb of Negan and the Saviors.
Related: ‘The Walking Dead’ Star Melissa McBride on Carol’s Nightmares and Daryl’s Sacrifice
“Is It Just Too Late to Get Away?”
At her house, Carol is awakened by a nightmare. She wakes up and has a smoke, but it doesn’t calm her down, and she’s teary as she appears troubled by something.
The next morning, she sets off for the Kingdom, where Morgan is training Benjamin’s brother, Henry, in the ways of staff fighting. Henry had previously told Morgan he wanted to be able to knock his big brother down with the staff, but Morgan gets him to admit he really just wants to be like Benjamin.
On her brief road trip, Carol knocks down one walker, then cleverly uses the stabby end of a One Way road sign to take out several others who are stalking the community’s front gate. The guards see her efforts and open up and let her enter, and while Benjamin wants to chat about her bada**ery, Carol just wants to see Morgan. She finds him in his room and gets right to the point of her pop-in: her Spidey senses have been tingling about what Daryl told her, that Rick and the others had defeated Negan, and that everything between the Alexandrians and the Saviors is now hunky-dory. She wants to know if that’s true, she tells Morgan, because she doesn’t get why Jesus would have brought Rick, Daryl, and the others to the Kingdom if the Saviors were not a threat.
But Morgan points out to her that he kept her story, her whereabouts, to himself, just as she had asked. So if she wants to discuss what Daryl told her, she is going to have to discuss it with Daryl. He even offers to accompany her on a trip to Alexandria for the chat — apparently assuming Daryl returned home instead of to the Hilltop. Carol’s upset, and Morgan asks her if she found what she was looking for during her self-imposed exile. “Or is it just too late to get away?” he asks.
She leaves the Kingdom without definitive answers, but clearly even more suspicious that all is not well with her friends. On her way out, Benjamin asks her if he can walk with her back to the house, and she tells him no. He just wants to see how she does what she does with the walkers, he tells her, saying he can skip the meetup with the Saviors to learn from her. She tells him to go to the meetup and keeps walking. Outside the gates, she spots the walker she knocked down, but didn’t kill, earlier. He’s now dead, via a stab to the head, and laying in a pool of blood. She looks around, trying to see who might have taken him out. No one’s in sight.
But lurking around the corner of a building: it’s Richard, who puts his daughter, Katy’s, backpack on the ground and starts covering it with the dirt he’s digging up.
Related: ‘The Walking Dead’ Postmortem: Lennie James on Morgan’s Breakdown and Why He Kills Again
Weevil Woes
Inside the Kingdom, Ezekiel is looking over the community from a level above the garden, where Daniel is picking cantaloupes. Shiva is beside the king, which provides no comfort to Nabila, the resident garden expert who arrives with bad news: there’s a weevil problem afoot, and within a week, it could wipe out a big portion of the crops. That would mean not only loss of food for the Kingdomites, but loss of the goods Ezekiel gifts the Saviors to keep them calm and non-murdery. Nabila says she’s sorry, but the royal garden will have to be cut and burned, so the courtyard crops can be saved.
“Here’s the beautiful thing, your majesty,” she says. “You can tear it out and cut it down, you can burn it and throw it all away, but if you want, it can all grow back.”
Ezekiel smiles at her insight that applies in so many big picture ways, and Shiva even offers up a little growl, as if to say she appreciates Nabila, too.
“Okay, I think I just pissed myself,” Nabila responds, and officially becomes the best new character introduced since the beloved Jerry.
Related: ‘The Walking Dead’: Scott Gimple on Sparking Morgan’s Trauma and the New Jerry
“Who’s the Girl?”
Benjamin goes to Morgan’s room to tell him they’ll be leaving in five minutes to drop off the latest offering to the Saviors. He also returns the book Morgan lent him — The Art of Peace, the book Eastman gave Morgan — and presents Morgan with a gift: a scavenged painting of a warrior with a gun, which Benjamin asked a female friend to alter and cover the gun with a staff. Morgan hangs it on his wall right away, and teasingly asks Benjamin who the girl is, one of the sweet signs that their mentor/mentee relationship has deepened and now includes a father/son-type connection.
Outside near the delivery truck, Morgan is waiting to leave when Richard approaches him. Richard tells Morgan about his family, a wife and a child, and how he has the perfect family, the perfect life. “I didn’t ask for much, and I got more than I deserved,” he says. “And you?”
Morgan just nods. Richard then apologizes, sorry that they have butted heads. He thinks Morgan is wrong in assuming the uneasy peace with the Saviors will last, he says, but he knows Morgan is a good man. “But the day’s coming with you can’t be that good,” Richard tells him. “When that happens, don’t beat yourself up about it.”
Jerry moment alert: Jerry’s still noshing on a heap of cobbler as the group prepares to depart. Ezekiel tells him to leave it behind. “Really?” Jerry sadly asks, his beard full of cobbler crumbs. “Jerry!” Ezekiel says sharply, before looking at his sidekick’s dessert-lovin’ face and telling him he can take the cobbler. Big smile from Jerry, the last one we’ll see this episode.
In route to the meeting, the group spots a string of shopping carts blocking the road. They all get out to investigate, with Richard telling them to keep their guns drawn and aimed, as the roadblock might be a trap. They all look around the area and stumble upon a grave, which appears to be freshly dug. There’s a handwritten sign near it that reads, “Bury Me Here.”
“This world drives one mad,” Ezekiel says, but Benjamin assures him, “You made us another world.”
They load back into the truck and arrive at the meetup, but Savior group leader Gavin is unhappy that they are late. He doesn’t want to hear Ezekiel’s excuse about the roadblock, and when Jerry warns him, “Don’t interrupt the King!” long-haired super creep Jared uses the staff he previously stole from Morgan to clock Jerry in the face. Benjamin calls him a “rat-faced prick,” and the whole incident has just angered Gavin even more. He tells Ezekiel not to bring that “your highness s**t” to them, and warns that thinks have been unnecessarily tense during their encounters lately. He didn’t “go this route” to be stressed, he says. He asks for the offering, and walks over to the truck to check it out. His response to the goods is to immediately demand Ezekiel and his people hand over their guns, too.
The King objects, and the Saviors and the Kingdomites draw their guns and point them at each other. Gavin says they can either use their guns or give them to the Saviors, but both Richard and Morgan try to squash the situation by telling Ezekiel they should give up the guns. They do, and Gavin says he demanded the weapons because things are about to get emotional, and Ezekiel’s people have proven they don’t respond well to emotional. Gavin says the delivery is short. There are supposed to be 12 cantaloupes, but there are only 11. Ezekiel is shocked, but when Gavin tells him to check, he sees there are only 11. He knows there were 12 in the truck when he counted them before they left the Kingdom, but Gavin doesn’t care. “Right now is the only time that matters,” Gavin says when Ezekiel offers to get more from home and return with them immediately. “We’re going to deal with this right now.”
The rat-faced Jared hears this and aims his gun at Richard’s head, but suddenly aims elsewhere and fires twice. He shoots Benjamin in the thigh, and the Kingdomites gather around him, panicked that he’s going to bleed to death before they can get him home to treat him. Ezekiel just wants to leave, but Gavin cautions he must return the next day with one cantaloupe.
They pack Benjamin into the truck, and have to call for a stunned Richard to climb in quickly. They speed off towards the Kingdom, and stop when they reach Carol’s cottage. They carry Benjamin in, but he’s losing blood too quickly for them to save him. He looks at Morgan and repeats something earlier he’d quoted as a favorite passage from The Art of Peace: “To injure an opponent is to injure yourself.” Morgan, and Richard, and Ezekiel are all devastated when Benjamin dies seconds later.
Morgan storms out and walks towards the Kingdom, but stops at the area where he and his friends had been forced to stop to clear the shopping cart blockade earlier. Morgan begins to meltdown, ranting, talking to himself, flashing back in his mind to signs and the walls of his apartment in Season 3’s “Clear.” He goes to the grave, the one with the “Bury Me Here” sign, and sits in it, and holds his knife to his wrist. He’s still angry, losing control, now out of the grave and flashing back to his dead son Duane, his dead wife, and he and Benjamin joking before they left on the ill-fated trip to give the Saviors 11 cantaloupes. He’s so filled with rage that he kicks at a yellow plastic bin, sending it flying. When it does, something rolls towards him.
It’s one cantaloupe.
“You. Have. To. Kill”
Morgan bursts into Richard’s room and tosses the yellow bin on the floor. Richard’s busted and he knows it. He set up the shopping cart roadblock, so the group would have to stop. When they did, he sneakily took one cantaloupe off the truck and hid it. He knew the shortage would make Gavin angry, and provoke an attack. Gavin had previously said any punishment necessary would first be aimed at Richard, so Richard assumed he would die hence the “Bury Me Here” grave he dug when we saw him shoveling dirt earlier — and that his death would push Ezekiel and Morgan into realizing they needed to go to war against the Saviors.
As Morgan stands there saying nothing, Richard tells him how he lost his wife and child at a camp after the apocalypse started. “I knew they had problems,” he says, “but I didn’t think they were mine to solve.” He thought smarter, stronger people would step up, he tells Morgan, and because he waited, and did nothing, his family died. He tries to convince Morgan they can use Benjamin’s death to their advantage and move ahead with his plan. When they deliver the cantaloupe to Gavin the next day, they should assure him they understand what happened, and that they are willing and able to move past it, that “we know how to go on.” This will eventually lull the Saviors into trusting them again, make them vulnerable, and then they can attack and kill Gavin and his men. Then they’ll join in with Rick and wipe out all the Saviors, he says.
“Morgan: You. Have. To. Kill! Or else you might as well kill yourself,” Richard says. He says someone had to die, and he wanted it to be him. That didn’t work out. “So, I’ll be the one to lead our army.” He also assures Morgan he’ll tell Ezekiel and everyone else in the group what he did, and will live the rest of his life making up for Benjamin’s death.
The next day, in the scene that played out to open the episode, the group packs up one cantaloupe and heads off for another meeting with Gavin. When they arrive, before the Saviors, Morgan asks Richard if he told Ezekiel. Richard says he’ll tell him when they get back. The King wants to know what they’re talking about, and insists they has it out now, but before they can, Gavin and company arrive.
Gavin asks how “the kid” is, and the silence and devastated looks that greet him tells him Benjamin died. He walks over to rat-faced Jared and orders him to start walking home, before he kills him. He tells him not to even throw a look at Ezekiel and his people, or he’ll kill him. Rat-faced Jared walks off.
Gavin asks for and receives the melon, and Richard speaks up. “I just want to say, we get it …” but before he can finish, Morgan attacks him. He tackles him to the ground, strangles him, and pounds Richard’s head into the ground until he’s dead. Shocked Ezekiel and the group look on.
Morgan tells them, Richard set the whole thing up with the missing melon. They had the whole offering, he says to Gavin, but Richard hid one to try to provoke Gavin to attack them. He assumed he would be the one to die, Morgan says, and when they shot Benjamin instead, Richard wanted to “show you we get it, we know how to go on,” Morgan continues, using the exact words Richard had planned to use on Gavin.
Gavin says he’ll see them at the next drop-off, and the Saviors leave. Ezekiel is still shocked, and angry, as it sinks in what Richard did.
“He wanted to die for us,” Morgan says. “He wanted it to be him… thought he could choose, and that’s why Duane had to die.”
“Duane?” Ezekiel asks.
Morgan gets choked up, struggles to regain and maintain his composure. “Benjamin, Benjamin… that’s why Benjamin…” he says.
Ezekiel gently urges Morgan to come home with the group, but Morgan refuses. After the others have left, he drags Richard’s body to the “Bury Me Here” grave. He’s covering him with the mound of dirt Richard dug, when he spots the Katy backpack. He picks it up, realizing what it is, and puts it atop Richard’s grave before he finishes burying him.
Morgan angrily walks along the nearby street, killing walkers with a new aggressiveness. He doesn’t just stab them with his staff, he jumps at them, acting like a killing machine instead of a man simply doing what he has to to protect himself and others.
Knock, Knock
Morgan arrives at Carol’s door, and when she answers, he asks, “Do you really wanna know what happened in Alexandria?”
“What happened to you?” she asks.
He tells her he killed Richard, strangled him, because he’s the one who got Benjamin killed.
“Do you wanna know what happened in Alexandria?” he asks again.
Carol slowly nods. “Yeah.”
He tells her: Negan killed Glenn and Abraham, beating them to death with a baseball bat. Now, Rick and the others are all living under Negan’s control. He also killed Spencer and Olivia, and the reason Jesus brought Rick and Daryl and the others to the Kingdom is because Rick wants to form an army to attack Negan.
“You wanted to know,” Morgan tells her. “Now you do.”
He stalks off, and when she asks him where he’s going, he tells her, “I’m gonna kill ‘em. Out there. One by one.” She asks him to wait, telling him he can stay at the house, instead. “You can go,” she says, pointing to the house, “and not go. Please… please.”
Carol packs up her stuff, and with a bag, arrives at the Kingdom. She finds Ezekiel, who’s replanting his garden, alongside Henry. Carol tells The King she’s sorry about Benjamin. She also tells him she’s going to stay there now, because they have to get ready. They have to fight, she says.
“We do,” Ezekiel agrees. “But not today,” and they both join Henry to replant more of the garden.
Meanwhile, back at Carol’s cottage, Morgan is sitting on the porch, sharpening his staff into a point, all the better, and more efficient, to stab living humans instead of walking dead ones.
Zombie Bites:
*Macsen Lintz, the young actor who plays Benjamin’s now heartbroken little brother, Henry, is the real-life little bro of Madison Lintz, the actress who played Carol’s daughter, Sophia, on Seasons 1 and 2.
*Before Morgan leaves Carol’s house after Benjamin’s death, he wipes his knife on the sheet covering the body. It didn’t happen on camera, but do we think he was the one to stab his young friend in the brain, to prevent him from reanimating?
*Better Call Saul fans, do you recognize Nadine Marissa, the actress who plays Nabila? In Saul Season 1 and 2, she played the courthouse administrator, the one who became much friendlier to Jimmy when he gifted her with Beanie Babies. Two back-to-back, scene-stealing performances for her on AMC, dontcha agree?
The Walking Dead airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on AMC.
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