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Legion contributor Mike Spring is recapping and reviewing The Walking Dead this season. Follow him on Twitter @themikespring!

Episode 4 of Season Five of The Walking Dead, “Slabtown,” opens with Beth (who we haven’t seen in several episodes) waking up in a hospital in what we find out is downtown Atlanta. As she bangs on the door and cries for help, a police officer and a doctor come in the room and tell Beth She learns that the police officer is named Dawn Lerner and the Doctor’s name is Stephen Edwards. Lerner tells Beth that some of their people saved her from some “rotters,” and that if it wasn’t for them, she’d be a walker by now, “So you owe us,” Lerner says. Cue opening credits.

Beth is shown around the hospital. Doctor Edwards takes Beth into a room with a patient in a coma. He turns off his respirator and explains that if patients don’t recover, they have no choice but to euthanize them. He then shows Beth how they dispose of the bodies: by dumping them down an elevator shaft while they’re still warm. He explains that they have the stairwells blocked off, but the windows are all blown out on the ground floor. The bodies falling attracts the rotters and they help clean up some of the mess.

In the commissary area of the hospital, Beth meets Officer Gorman, a creepy guy that tells her that he’s one of the men who saved her. He tells her that everything costs something and makes no secret of his lecherous intentions.

A little later, Officer Lerner comes in with a new patient named Trevitt, a man who fell from a building while trying to escape some rotters. When another officer whispers something to Lerner, she suddenly orders Doctor Edwards to try and save him, despite Doctor Grant’s assurances that he can’t. When he tells Beth to get him a long needle, she freezes and the patient loses a lot of blood. Officer Lerner yells at Doctor Edwards and then turns and smacks Beth across the face.

Soon after, Officer Lerner brings in another patient who has bitten on the arm. Her name is Joan, and she’s agitated and angry, and they have her strapped down to a gurney. It turns out she had tried to escape the hospital and got bitten. When Doctor Edwards tries to give her anesthetic, she rebuffs him, and Lerner orders him to do it without anesthetic. Forcing Beth to help hold the patient down, he saws off the patient’s arm while she screams.

Afterward, Beth runs into a male “nurse” named Noah, folding laundry. He tells how he came to be there; the hospital people found him and his dad and said “they could only save one.” When Beth asks why Joan would try to escape, Noah tells her that they usually save people who are weak and can’t fight back, and then force them to work off their “debt.” Then he tells Beth that eventually he realized that they left his father behind because he was bigger and stronger and, “He could fight back.” He tells Beth that he’s been there for about a year and is planning on escaping soon.

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Officer Lerner finds Beth doing chores and sits her down for a talk. She tells Beth that they’re doing good work and saving lives, and that food, shelter, and protection have never been free. “Just keep working off what you we and you’ll be out of here in no time,” she says.

Later, Beth is mopping up blood in the room with the now-one-armed Joan. She tells Beth that Lerner could control the men if she wanted to, but it’s easier not to. When Beth asks her what they did to her, she tells her it doesn’t matter. “I guess it’s easier to make a deal with the devil when you’re not the one paying the price.”

Back in her own room, Beth then gets cornered by Gorman, who is sucking on a lollipop that Noah had left for Beth earlier. He corners her and forces her to suck on the lollipop, until Doctor Edwards walks in and stops him. “The girl should have been mine,” Gorman says. Doctor Edwards tells him that nobody is his and he’s never going to get Joan back. Gorman gets into Edwards’ face, but eventually walks away. Beth asks Doctor Edwards “Why do you stay?” He doesn’t answer.

Instead, he takes her down to the ground floor to show her something. “This isn’t a way out,” he says. There isn’t one.“ When she asks him why he brought her there, he says, “watch,” and clanks a metal bar against the grate to the lobby beyond. Immediately, a horde of walkers throws themselves against it. Now we know why he doesn’t leave.

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They go to the roof, and Edwards tells Beth about what happened when the outbreak first happened and the hospital was evacuated. He explains how a few of them got left behind and had to start to fend for themselves. In the background, downtown Atlanta is charred and damaged. Doctor Edwards explains that when he found his first patient, Dawn told him they couldn’t spare the resources to save him. Edwards bargained with her and she told him that the boy could work off his treatment with service. He explains that Dawn took charge and keeps them all alive. “You call this living?” she asks him. He asks her to stop in and check on Trevitt, and to give him a dose of Clozapine.

Beth stops in to treat a patient, giving him the drug Doctor Stephens told her to. Noah stops in to talk to her when the patient immediately starts to go into seizures and dies. Lerner comes down and puts a knife through his head, then yells at Beth and Noah. Noah takes the blame for Beth, and Lerner takes him away and has him beaten. She talks to Doctor Edwards and he tells her that she gave the patient the wrong drug.

Lerner confronts Beth and tells her she knows it was Beth’s fault the patient died. Lerner tells Beth that they have to work towards the greater good. “You’re not the greater good,” she tells Beth. She tells Beth that Beth is weak. “Some people aren’t cut out for this life, and that’s okay. As long as they don’t take advantage of the people who are.”

Beth meets up with a visibly bruised Noah. She tells Noah she’s going with him when he escapes. He says that the basement is the best way out. They plot for Beth to steal Lerner’s key to the elevator bank.

Beth sneaks into Lerner’s office and looks for the key. She notices blood on the floor. She sees that it’s coming from Joan, who has seemingly killed herself by cutting open the sutures holding her wrist closed.

Beth is looking through the drawers and finds the key, and just then Gorman walks in and discovers her. He tells her that they can work something out so he doesn’t have to tell Lerner about Beth breaking into her office. As he begins to try and force her to have sex with him, Beth sees the body of Joan start to twitch. She hits Gorman over the head with a glass and as he falls to the ground, Joan — now a zombie — bites into his neck and kills him. Beth grabs his gun and takes off.

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As Beth is walking to meet Noah, she passes Lerner. Beth tells her that Joan and Gorman were looking for her in her office. Soon after, as Noah and Beth make their way to the elevator shaft, we hear chaos from behind them.

Noah lowers Beth into the elevator shaft with a makeshift rope made of bedsheets, then climbs down after her. Halfway down, a walker reaches through an open elevator shaft door and attacks him. Noah lets go of the rope and falls down the shaft, landing on the pile of half-eaten bodies down below. Beth follows him down and they start to make their way through the damaged building.

A few walkers attack them, and Beth kills them with the gun. They make it outdoors into the bright sunlight, and are quickly surrounded by a huge number of walkers. Cutting through a hole in the fence, they try to fight their way through the walkers. Noah runs past them, leaving Beth behind, and escapes through a fence, while Beth is saved by a well-timed shot by Officer Lerner. As she runs to try and catch up to Noah, she is tackled and handcuffed by another officer.

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Back in Lerner’s office, where Joan and Gorman have been killed, Beth and Lerner have an argument. Beth tells Lerner that no one is coming to save them, a hope that Lerner’s been holding out on the whole time. Lerner hits Beth and knocks her out.

Later, Edwards is examining Beth. She asks him how he knew that Trevitt was a doctor. “That’s why you had me give him the wrong meds, right? That’s why you had me kill him? Cause if he had lived, there would’ve been another doctor and Dawn wouldn’t need you.” Edwards replies by looking at a painting on his wall and saying, “When they arrested Christ, Peter denied being one of his disciples. He didn’t have a choice; they would have crucified him too.”

Gorman explains that he knew Trevitt before the outbreak, and that if he had lived they would have kicked Edwards out or killed him. Shortly thereafter, as Doctor Edwards is standing in the hall, we see Beth walking towards him with a pair of scissors in her hand. It’s clear she’s intent on killing him. Before she can, though, a group of officers rush in with another patient on a gurney.

As they wheel the gurney into a room, we see that it’s an unconscious Carol.

Holy $#!&.

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Mike Spring

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