Something clued her in to this plan - the way one chaperone was eyeballing her, maybe, it wasn’t clear - and she fled, briefly battling her pursuers until the kindhearted Cyndie bailed her out.
That’s what Tara was led to believe anyway - in reality she was being led to her own execution. But she asked Tara to join them and then, after she heard the Alexandrians had provoked the Saviors, apparently decided Tara needed to die soon rather than possibly reveal the camp’s location later.Ī compromise was offered: Tara could return to Alexandria with a guide, as possibly the first step in opening diplomatic relations between the two settlements. But soon enough Tara was captured and enjoying some soup while getting the community’s back story from a grandmother named Natania. After playing possum for awhile, Tara made her way into the camp proper, where she observed a group of hardscrabble women doing chores, educating their children and, eventually, trying to shoot her.Įmphasis on “trying” - for a shoot first, ask questions later group, its members could use some target practice. One corollary: Anything you do in the name of protecting your people is justified.īut what happens if you end up in the cross hairs of that belief system? Tara was about to find out.Īfter walkers forced her from a bridge into a waterway of some sort, she washed ashore to be discovered by the girls mentioned above: the bloodthirsty Rachel, the product of a warlike settlement, and Cyndie. Tara, predictably, wasn’t having it - the strength in unity philosophy amounts to the Golden Rule of the Alexandrians. “Nobody’s in this together, not anymore,” he tells Tara. Even more alarming: Heath, still rattled by all the killing back at the Savior post last season, was starting to question whether all of Rick’s endless “we’re in this together” rhetoric actually meant anything. Tara and Heath were also famished, as it happened, but all they had to show for their two weeks of scrounging were some aspirin and a few rusty cans of okra, which I didn’t even know came in cans. But after six weeks of table-setting, I’m getting pretty hungry for some narrative progress. We knew going into this season that the story was shifting into a new phase involving lots of new people, new conflicts and, as a result, lots of set up. That means they were blissfully unaware of everything that had transpired since - the murder of Tara’s girlfriend, Denise, shot through the face by Dwight the deaths of Glenn and Abraham the subjugation of Alexandria.īut while this episode had some nice moments and Alanna Masterson is charming as Tara, I could never quite get past the fact that we were devoting an entire hour to another marginal character, while meeting yet another new group. You remember Tara, right? The spunky woman who first arrived in this story during the Governor’s comeback tour, before joining Team Rick via the Abraham and Glenn group? You’ll recall that she and Heath left on a supply run right after last season’s attack on the Savior satellite post.
The star of the night, however, was Tara, who on Sunday got nearly as much screen time as she’d collectively received to date. This zero tolerance policy found its purest expression in a little girl who hoped to murder defenseless strangers, though another resident, Cyndie, longed for a more humane way to live. The experience turned the group into an object lesson in violence begetting violence, as the women adopted a strategy of killing all interlopers on sight. We also met yet another new settlement: a militant tribe of women whose husbands, brothers and sons had been killed by a particularly vicious gang of Saviors. It was fringe character week on “The Walking Dead” on Sunday, as we left the main group behind entirely to spend an hour watching Tara and Heath scavenge, frolic in a zombie sandbox and negotiate post-apocalypse morality.