The Walking Dead Season 5 Episode 1: No Sanctuary

[Midnight Man 2]

The last we seen of our friends that live among the walking dead, they had reached the famed Terminus, where they discovered that their friends had already been there, or were still there, and they weren’t anywhere in sight. A battle ensues and before you know it our friends are trapped in a boxcar. And, of course, we pick it up right where we left off.

We also get an insight as to why the sanctuary people are the way that they are, “You’re either the butcher or the cattle”. Cannibalism, it’s a wonder that it took five seasons for this part of the human psyche to rear its ugly head. We’ve seen our friends go through many hardships to get to this point. They have had to kill to find shelter, they have had to kill to find their friends, and they have even had to kill to find food, but they have not, in all this time, ever eaten human flesh.

The slaughterhouse scenes are rather gruesome though, certainly not for the faint of heart. Eight men bound and gagged forced to hang their heads over a trough as two Terminus people stand behind them, one with a baseball bat and one with a large knife. Both clad in plastic aprons to deflect blood splatter, one smacks them in the head with the bat and the other slices their throats with the knife as the blood drains down the trough. Four are gruesomely killed and just before they get to the fifth person, Glenn, their leader, Gareth, comes in to get an ammunition count. Bob, Rick, Daryl, and Glenn are left kneeling before the trough. Bob tries to reason with them, to no avail and the leader kneels down in front of Rick and wants to know what he did with the big bag that the spotters seen him go into the woods with and furthermore wants to know what’s in it. Rick rattles off the things that are in the bag and at the end he looks Gareth square in the eyes and says, “There is a machete with a red handle, and that’s what I’m going to use to kill you”. Gareth laughs and puts the gag back on Rick so the slaughter can continue. Suddenly shots ring out somewhere in the compound and there is an explosion. After Gareth leaves to investigate Rick breaks free, kills the bat guy and the knife guy with a wooden steak that he hid in his sock and made at the box car, and sets his friends free. As they look for weapons to fight their way out they see the rest of the slaughterhouse. A trimmed down torso hanging from a hook and cut up human bodies lying on stainless steel tables shouldn’t be anyone’s idea of their next meal, but apparently to the Terminus dwellers, it is. Daryl said it best when he expressed his opinion about them when he answered Bob’s query about what kind of people they are, he said, “these ain’t people”, and he was absolutely correct about that. They’re animals, which have no regard for their fellow human beings. How vile, although a fantastic Walking Dead scenario to open a season.

Carol is the wild card here; it seems that the people of the sanctuary pulled their spotters back just a little too soon. She has been looking for her friends for some time now and she’s not going to let them die. Shooting the gas tank was an absolutely outstanding idea, and a good scene. Burning walkers infiltrating that compound made for a good escape plan and we actually get to see one eating a man’s face. She dirties herself up with blood and guts to go along with the herd as it swamps Terminus and she takes out a few gunners along the way. As she searches through one of the buildings she scavenges a few things, but before she can make good her escape she meets a woman that wants her dead, they brawl with Carol coming out on top with a shot to the woman’s leg. The woman begs Carol to finish the job with a shot to her head, but Carol’s not having any of that and opens the door so the walkers can get at her.

Before Carol hit the compound, she and Tyreese met a man at a little shed setting off fireworks to distract the walkers away from Terminus. Tyreese was left to guard him and now the man has gotten free and got his hands on Judith and threatens to break her neck if Tyreese doesn’t go outside and face the walkers, which he does to spare the baby from death. He kills all the walkers outside and comes storming back in screaming, “I won’t, I won’t, I won’t”, meaning he’s not going to kill, but he is so mad that he almost beats the man to death.

Rick and the other three men make their way back to the boxcar and release the others and they all make their way out of the Terminus compound. There they meet up with Carol. She takes them to the shed and Rick and Carl are reunited with Judith, the first time they have seen her since the fight with the Governor at the prison. The family is together again.

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