'The Walking Dead' Recap: There's a New Sheriff in Town

Danai Gurira as Michonne, Melissa McBride as Carol Peletier, and Andrew Lincoln as Rick Grimes
Danai Gurira as Michonne, Melissa McBride as Carol Peletier, and Andrew Lincoln as Rick Grimes

Warning: This recap for the “Remember” episode of The Walking Dead contains storyline and character spoilers.

And they’re inside! Rick and his group have entered the safe little ‘burg called Alexandria, and it appears the town and its people can offer Rick’s crew everything they’ve come to believe they would never have again, including amenities like electricity, hot showers, clean shelter, and a community of other survivors they can trust.

But appearances have been deceiving before, which is why Rick and his friends are not only leery of throwing themselves into the community full force, but also concerned this relatively cushy new lifestyle could make them as weak as their nice but coddled new neighbors…

Meet Deanna

Minor spoiler if you haven’t read the Walking Dead comics: In the book, the leader of Alexandria is a man, but when Rick meets the leader in the series, she’s Deanna Monroe, a former Ohio congresswoman whose family settled in the planned community while trying to get back home after the apocalypse.

Related: Take a Bite Out of Our ‘Walking Dead’ Recaps

Deanna, as she will with each member of Rick’s group, interviews Rick and videotapes the conversation. She tells him how the community came to be: Her husband is (was?) an architect, and he planned and fortified the area with supplies found at a nearby shopping mall construction. Deanna seems to trust Rick — she isn’t surprised when he tells her he was once a sheriff — and is eager to integrate his group into the community. Rick tells her she should keep the community gates closed, and be careful about who she trusts.

“It’s all about survival now, at any cost,” he tells her. “People out there are always looking for an angle… play on your weakness. They measure you by what they can take from you, by how they can use you to live.”

The Beard

Rick’s scruffy beard is no more. He takes a shower and shaves months of facial fur down the drain, and when neighbor Jessie shows up at the front door of one of the two houses Rick’s group was given with a basket of goodies (toilet paper!) from the community pantry, she completes Rick’s makeover with a haircut.

“Electricity, showers, haircuts… I never thought I’d see those again,” Rick says, getting emotional about these new luxuries and, methinks, the act of getting the haircut — an intimacy he hasn’t experienced with another female since Lori’s death.

As for how the rest of the group is dealing with their new surroundings: Daryl is hostile about the situation, telling Carol she looks ridiculous when she dons a cardigan to make herself appear as non-threatening as possible, and refusing to explore Alexandria or take a shower; Michonne spends 20 minutes in the bathroom enjoying the chance to brush her teeth; Glenn tells Deanna the group has to make this new home work, because they “were almost out there too long”; and Carl tells Rick he likes the place and the people, but he’s afraid of becoming weak like them.

A Man With a Plan

Rick decides to go exploring outside the Alexandria gates with a destination in mind: the house where he hid a gun inside an old blender in last week’s episode. Just as he opens the blender to see the gun’s not there, Carl walks up — he’d followed fellow teen Enid after seeing her sneak outside the gates — and the two take on a pack of walkers with their knives. No need to worry about getting weak anytime soon.

Not that there isn’t something to worry about… everyone in Rick’s group is being assigned a job by Deanna, and Glenn, Tara, and Noah are sent out with gate guard Nicholas and Deanna’s son Aidan on a trial supply run. Aidan is cocky and dismissive of Glenn and the others, even though, when they reveal they’re tying up a zombie in the woods to torture him for killing the still-living, Glenn handily stabs the walker and saves any further still-living deaths when the walker gets loose.

When the supply run team gets back inside the gates, Aidan fires Glenn, Tara, and Noah, telling them they’re not ready for the job.

“Pretty sure you got that backwards,” Glenn says, and the two get into a physical fight that ends with Aidan on the ground and Daryl jumping in the fray when Nicholas comes at Glenn.

Rick arrives on the scene to help break it up, and when Deanna sees it unfold, she offers Rick a job: Will he be the town’s constable? She offers Michonne the same gig, and when they both accept, Daryl snorts and stalks off.

Later, Rick tries on his new uniform — complete with tie — and talks on the porch with Carol and Daryl.

“I think we can start sleeping in our own homes, settle in,” Rick tells them.

Carol: “If we get comfortable here, let our guards down, this place is going to make us weak.”

“Carl said that, but it’s not gonna happen,” Rick tells his friends. “We won’t get weak. That’s not us anymore. We’ll make it work. If they can’t make it work…”

“… then we’ll just take this place.”

Zombie Bites:

* Deanna tells Rick she exiled three men from Alexandria, which was as good as sentencing them to death. But was it? Might they be the ones responsible for the butchered zombies surrounding Shirewilt Estates, Noah’s home, in “What Happened and What’s Going On”? And Enid has only been in the community for a few months… is she somehow involved with the exiled group? Is that why Carl sees her sneaking outside the Alexandria gates? And could the exiles be the ones who swiped Rick’s blender gun?

* Rick meets Jessie’s husband while he’s taking a walk one night. Mr. Jessie isn’t so friendly, and makes a point of letting Rick know he knows Jessie cut his hair. That’s gonna be trouble…

OK, Dead-heads, that last line of Rick’s… was it predicting an epic battle for control of Alexandria? And who do you think is going to cause more trouble for Rick: Deanna’s creep of a son Aidan, or whoever is almost certainly lurking outside the Alexandria gates?

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