The Walking Dead: ‘Forget’ Recap and Review

Season 5 of The Walking Dead continued last night with the 13th episode of the season, Forget, as Constable Grimes and the others in his group are still trying to integrate themselves into the oddly peaceful community known as Alexandria.  Grimes himself seems to fitting in just nicely, as he’s got to be more than happy about finding someplace where his children can safely sleep at night.  Others in the group, however, seem to be struggling a little more.

Sasha, for example, seems to be suffering from some good old-fashioned PTSD.  The episode began with the sharpshooter, still obviously distraught over the horrors witnessed at Terminus and losing both her boyfriend and her brother, being unable to sleep.  She’s bothered by a stranger’s family photos adorning the new house she was staying in, and her method of dealing with this problem was to set up all the pictures out in the woods so she could destroy them all with well-placed sniper bullets.  Unable to escape the mental trauma of her past experiences on the outside, Sasha is unable to fit in with the cozy atmosphere of Alexandria.  She takes an offer to get some more alone time as a lookout, where she meets Deanna’s awkward son Spencer, who seems to have already taken a liking to her.

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Meanwhile, Rick and his two most-trusted allies, Daryl and Carol, meet in the woods to discuss their plan for secretly getting back a few of their guns which had been locked away in the armory.  They meet in the spot where Rick had previously stashed a gun in a blender only for it to disappear later, so was this the best spot for them to have a secret meeting?  Somebody might be watching.  Anyway, Carol offers to leave the armory window open so they can sneak in later and retrieve some of the guns.  Moments later, Daryl kills a walker and notices a ‘W’ carved into its forehead.  What could this mean?

Under the guise of a simple, nice lady with a penchant for baking cookies, Carol succeeds in her plan to retrieve the locked guns.  After discreetly unlocking a window, Carol returns at night and collects a few handguns before being noticed by a cookie-loving little boy who had followed her inside.  After the boy threatens to tell his mother about catching Carol in the act, she tells him that doing so will result in him waking up one day tied up to a tree and left to the walkers.  If he kept the secret, however, he’d be rewarded with lots of cookies.  Carol’s scare tactics seemed to have worked as she later shows the guns she procured to Rick and Daryl, with Rick taking one.

Outside the walls, Daryl and Aaron go on a hunting trip together where they come across Buttons, a horse that Aaron had evidently been trying to capture for a while.  Daryl comes close to throwing a lasso on the steed when a pack of walkers ruin everything by turning Buttons into an all-you-can-eat buffet.  Daryl showed his tender side by insisting he and Aaron kill all the walkers and put poor Buttons out of his misery.  Why is it that the animal deaths on the show are sadder than the majority of human deaths?

With the rest of Alexandria seemingly intimidated by Daryl, Aaron persists in getting him to open up, sensing a good person beneath the rough exterior.  He makes progress as Daryl actually accepts an invitation to join Aaron and Eric for a spaghetti dinner (Hershel would be proud, especially if this happened to be on a Tuesday).  Aaron further solidifies his spot as Daryl’s new best friend when he shows him a garage containing a few motorcycles with a slew of spare parts.

The relationship between Rick and his new stylist, Jessie, continued to evolve into something more intimate, despite Jessie being married with children.  With her architect husband out of the room, Rick plants a kiss on Jessie who seems to have enjoyed it immensely.  It would seem Rick didn’t learn a thing about what happened with Lori and Shane.  At least in their case, they thought Rick was dead and never coming back!  Now, I’m sure there are a lot of viewers who don’t feel so bad about cute little Judith actually being Shane, Jr.

Something about this episode that really seemed to bother me was the red ‘A’ letter that Jessie’s son Sam was stamping on everyone’s hands.  With Rick and everyone else locked inside another set of walls, doesn’t branding them with ‘A’ seem a little too close to what happened with Terminus?  After all, ‘A’ was the name of the boxcar that the group was placed into, and they were further labeled as such by the surviving Terminus clan when they were holed up in the church.  Now, they’re putting the letter straight onto their hands.  It’s just a little eerie, and if I were Rick, I wouldn’t be so sure about having that label on my skin!

The Walking Dead continues Sunday nights on AMC at 9/8c.