RECAP: The Walking Dead, The First 5.5 Seasons

THE WALKING DEAD is back tomorrow!  THE WALKING DEAD is back tomorrow!  THE WALKING DEAD is back tomorrow!

I figure maybe you might have forgotten something that happened in the first five and a half seasons.

SEASON ONE: Rick Grimes is really glad that Robert Kirkman watched 28 Days that one time.  Somebody tries to paint a helpful sign on a door, but forgets how English writing works and tells people not to dead because there are open inside, which just doesn’t make any damn sense at all:

Morgan can’t quite bring himself to shoot his wife, but Lori and Shane waited like no time at all after the apocalypse to move on from her husband and his best friend’s death.  Carl is annoying and gets the stupid hat.  Merle gets chained to a roof and has to saw off his own hand to escape, cauterizing it on a stove on the way out.  And Daryl looked like this:

They find a bunch of yahoos in the woods and try to have a campout, but a bunch of them get eaten instead.  Andrea makes the last good decision she’ll ever make, shooting her sister Amy in the head after she gets bitten.  Shane’s all angsty.  And they make it to the CDC in Atlanta, which rather inconveniently blows up soon after they arrive.  Dale goes all crazy when Andrea tries to suggest that she wants to die in the explosion, but not a single person says a word when the only black woman in the cast makes the exact same decision.

SEASON TWO: Carl gets shot and they find the farmhouse.  WORDS WORDS WORDS WORDS WORDS where’s Carl WORDS WORDS WORDS WORDS WORDS Carl’s not in the house WORDS WORDS WORDS WORDS WORDS Shane gets a haircut WORDS WORDS WORDS WORDS WORDS OMG Sophia was in the barn all along!! WORDS WORDS WORDS WORDS WORDS Lori’s pregnant.  It’s probably Shane’s.  WORDS WORDS WORDS Beth tries to kill herself; she’s not a black woman so someone talks her out of it. WORDS WORDS WORDS WORDS WORDS Lori manages to flip her car over on an empty stretch of road:

WORDS WORDS WORDS Shane goes slowly nuts and Carl has to shoot him and, uh-oh, you come back to life after you die even if the zombies didn’t bite, you, WE ARE ALL THE WALKING DEAD!!! WORDS WORDS WORDS WORDS WORDS zombie horde chases everyone out of the farmhouse and somewhere in there Dale got killed.

Also Carl’s not in the house.  Where’s Carl?

Season Two was kinda dull, guys.  The mid-season and season finales were great, but gah, the rest of that season.

SEASON THREE: Andrea is separated from the rest of the yahoos, but saved by Michonne; the rest of the group manages to find the prison and decides to try to live there.  Andrea ends up in Woodbury, which is a decent place to live except for the part where the leader is cray-cray.  Hershel gets bit and they saw his leg off.  T-Dog gets killed for, like, no reason at all in the same episode that another black guy starts to get lines.  Lori’s been pregnant all this time and has to give birth via an inconveniently-timed emergency (messy) C-Section, and Carl shoots her in the head afterward, meaning that Carl likely killed both of his new sister Judith’s actual parents.  Rick goes crazy.  Michonne doesn’t like the Governor very much, Andrea likes the Governor a lot, and Tyreese gets added to the cast so the black guy who replaced T-Dog gets killed.  This is the “Andrea is dumb” season.

There’s a weird moment where Herschel tries to convince everyone that Carl did something wrong by shooting someone who was clearly advancing on them with a weapon, but the storyline gets dropped fast.

Merle gets killed by the Governor and zombified; Daryl has to shoot him.  The season ends in a finale where Rick and the Governor never actually encounter each other.  Andrea gets eaten because she can’t pick up a pair of pliers with her toes given, like, twenty minutes.  I literally– this is not a joke– bind myself to a rocking chair in the house and get my shoes off and pick up the pliers without my hands in less than thirty seconds.  Woodbury gets reduced to a wreck and they bring a bunch of survivors back to the prison.  This was the worst season or mid-season finale until the most recent one.  Mighta been worse.

SEASON FOUR: Nobody knows where the Governor is, so obviously everything is fine and it’s time to start farming at the prison.  Only problem?  Spanish influenza, which as it turns out is kinda difficult to deal with in the zombie apocalypse.  A bunch of nobody importants die, and Glenn gets really sick.  Meanwhile, the Governor is off wandering around and being boring, and he encounters a trailer park full of people and slowly takes it over.  Somebody mysterious is feeding the walkers, but it’s really obvious that it’s one of the two kids who Carol is trying to bond with.  Carol is teaching all of the Woodbury kids how to fight with knives, by the way.  It’s actually kinda cool.  The Governor and his people get ahold of a tank and attack the prison, cutting off Herschel’s head with Michonne’s sword in the process in the best finale of the entire series, which splits the entire group up.  The rest of the season is the entire group, broken up into three or four parties, all slowly heading to a place of refuge called Terminus.  The season ends with the group reunited, having been stampeded into a railway car by the Termites.

Also Carol ended up having to shoot those kids.

Which brings us to Season Five.  Recaps begin here, y’all.

And now you’re caught up!