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Legion contributor Mike Spring is recapping and reviewing The Walking Dead for us this season. Follow him on Twitter @themikespring or like him on Facebook at Facebook.com/MikeSpringOfficial.

WARNING: Massive spoilers ahead!!!

It’s our first episode back after the long winter break, and The Walking Dead isn’t slowing down. Episode #509 of Season 5 of The Walking Dead, “What Happened and What’s Going On,” finds a good balance between metaphysical rumination and zombie action.

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First off, throughout this episode, there are hallucinatory flashbacks and flash-forwards in random little snippets. As they are hard to describe and mostly portend things to come in the episode, I am going to skip trying to describe them here.

The episode starts with one of these little vignettes. We see flashes of Maggie crying, Father Gabriel reading a eulogy, Noah crying, and Rick and the gang running with guns drawn, among other things. Then we see Noah telling Rick that Beth was planning to accompany him to his neighborhood sanctuary outside of Richmond, Virginia. Rick tells the group it has a wall, homes, 20 people, and they hope it might be a new place to call home. We then see the group’s two cars drive past a sign that says South Carolina, and for the first time in five seasons, they’re not in Georgia anymore.

After the credits, we’re in one of the trucks with Rick, Noah, Tyreese, Glenn, and Michonne. Rick contacts Carol on the walkie talkie and tells them to hang back as back-up. Noah and Tyreese get into a conversation where Noah tells Tyreese that the trade for Beth was the right play. That it worked, but something else happened after. Tyreese replies that “It went the way it had to. The way it was always going to.” This is a theme that will recur throughout the episode. Tyreese tells Noah about how, when he was a kid, his father would purposefully leave on news broadcasts in the car, no matter how horrible they were, so that the could learn to keep up with the news and be responsible citizens; to face it, and to keep their eyes open. Noah reveals that he lost his dad in Atlanta. “Still got a mom and a couple of twin brothers,” he says. “I hope.”

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When the gang arrives at Noah’s neighborhood, they park the truck in the woods outside near a wreck of two vehicles and go in on foot. After making their way through a makeshift wall of metal cable, they arrive at a big metal reinforced gate, and Glenn climbs up over it to look inside. He looks around and then shakes his head at Noah with a defeated look on his face. Noah climbs up and hops over the fence. Inside, the houses are all burned and there are bodies, both human and walker, scattered everywhere. Noah breaks down screaming and crying.

Rick, Glenn and Michonne decide to do a quick sweep for supplies while Tyreese stays with Noah. He tries to comfort Noah as Michonne dispatches a stray couple of zombies. Rick lets Carol know the situation: “We made it. It’s gone.” As Rick, Glenn, and Michonne look for supplies, they get talking. Rick reveals that he knows Dawn killed Beth by accident, but he still wanted to kill her. He wonders if killing her or not would have made any difference at all. He tells Glenn that Beth wanted to get Noah back home, so this trip was for her. “And it could have been for us, too,” he says.

Tyreese tells Noah a story about how he had almost given up and let the walkers take him, but he ultimately pushed through and decided to live. Noah finally stops crying and gets up, then takes off at a run. Tyreese follows after him. Meanwhile, Glenn tells Rick that he’s changed, that if he had run across the man at Terminus that he had insisted they stop and save, he wouldn’t have stopped now. Michonne starts a conversation about where the group plans to settle. “You can be out here too long,” she says.

Noah finally stops running in front of a house. “This is my house,” he says. Tyreese agrees to let him in, but goes first to clear out any walkers. As they enter the house, they see Noah’s mother dead on the floor. As Noah covers her up and grieves, Tyreese explores the rest of the house. He hears a walker behind a bedroom door, and walks into another bedroom where one of Noah’s younger brother’s bodies is laying on the bed. Tyreese looks at a series of pictures of the twin boys on the wall and becomes mesmerized by them, pain evident in his eyes. While he’s staring at them, the walker that Noah’s other brother has become sneaks up on Tyreese and bites him savagely on there arm. Noah shows up and kills his younger brother with a model airplane to the eye, then runs out to get the others for help.

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As Tyreese lays bleeding on the floor, he begins to hallucinate, both visually and aurally. He hears a British news broadcast about rebels and killings and then he sees Martin, the terminus baddie who tried to kill Tyreese and Judith, who begins to tell Tyreese that this is all his fault for letting him live. Bob shows up to dispute this, telling Tyreese, “It went the way it had to. The way it was always going to.” Martin says that things would have changed, that “the bill would have been paid.”

“The bill has to be paid,” says a voice off camera. Tyreese looks over and it’s The Governor. “You told me you’d do whatever you had to do to earn your keep.” Tyreese looks to the side and sees Lizzie and Mika (the two young girls from the “Just look at the flowers” episode), and Lizzie says, “It’s better now, Tyreese. It is.” The Governor begins to argue and walk towards Tyreese yelling, at which point he morphs back into a walker that is attacking Tyreese (one that looks uncannily like Bruce Dern.) Tyreese tries to fight him off but he is weak, and the walker bites him in the arm again. Tyreese finally manages to kill it.

Rick, Glenn, and Michonne have gathered supplies, and Michonne tries to convince Rick that they can repair the gate and still make this neighborhood work. Rick argues that it’s surrounded by forest and there are no sight lines, that someone could sneak up on them and they’d never know it. Michonne leads them outside the gates, where they find a number of half-torsos of zombies, just their legs. The wall is crumbled in multiple places. Michonne realizes this place won’t work, but she pleads with Rick to head to Washington, DC, reasoning that even though Eugene lied, DC might still offer some hope. Rick agrees with her that since it’s only 100 miles away, they will try. They then hear Noah calling for help and take off running.

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We see Noah trapped by two walkers on the porch of a house and they are dispatched by Rick and company. Michonne almost gets bit by a walker, but Rick saves her. They run off to find Tyreese. Tyreese is still hallucinating and hearing radio broadcasts. Then he hears a song, and Beth is in the room, singing and strumming her guitar. She then tells Tyreese, “It’s okay, Tyreese. You gotta know that now.” Bob chips in with, “It’s okay that you didn’t want to be a part of it anymore, Ty.” Martin tries to goad Tyreese again, while Lizzie and Mika remind him that it’s better now. The Governor once again excoriates Tyreese for not adapting to his ways. He chastises Tyreese for forgiving Carol for killing Karen back at the prison.

Tyreese stands up and addresses the Governor. “I didn’t know who I was talking to. I said I would do what I had to to earn my keep, but I didn’t know you. But I know, I know who I am,” he tells him. “Everything that you were is dead. And it’s not over. I forgave her because it’s not over. I didn’t turn away. I kept listening to the news so I could do what I could to help. I’m not giving up. People like me, they can live.”

The others show up and before Tyreese can even realize what’s going on, they chop off his arm with Michonne’s sword to try and fight the infection before he turns into a walker.

Carrying Tyreese, the group hurries to get back to the car. Unable to carry him over the gate the same way they came in, they have to break the chains keeping it closed. As they do, a horde of walkers swarms in. Rick, Glenn, and Michonne make short work of them (in an intense slow motion sequence) while Noah watches over Tyreese. They make it back to the truck, carrying Tyreese most of the way. The truck has trouble getting out of the soft ground and slams into the truck that was part of the accident they parked near. When they do, a slew of zombie torsos — just heads and chests — spew out all over the van, still “alive,” jaws opening and closing futilely. The gang drives off, and Tyreese continues to hallucinate, seeing Bob, Beth, Lizzie and Mika.

They speed off after Rick alerts Carol that they’re going to need to cauterize the wound and to get Sasha and Carl away, as they don’t need to see this. As the group drives away, Tyreese hears the news broadcast again on the car radio, and he finally whispers, “Turn it off.”

“You sure?” asks Bob. “It’s okay, Tyreese. You gotta know that now,” says Beth. “It isn’t just okay, its better now,” says Lizzie. Bob smiles at Tyreese. The light in Tyreese’s eyes starts to go out.

The truck comes to a stop. Rick, Glenn, Noah, and Michonne pull Tyreese’s body out of it. Nichonne pulls her sword. The next thing we see is Tyreese being buried by the whole group. As Father Gabriel reads the eulogy, each of the group members throws a shovelful of dirt on Tyreese’s body The last one to do so is Sasha, who is quite visibly in shock. She drops the shovel and stumbles away, and Rick begins to finish the task of covering Tyreese up.

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Mike Spring