The Walking Dead Recap: Slow and Sad Wins the Race – Plus, a New Character!

The last few episodes of The Walking Deadhave been particularly brutal, so a return to sad walking around was weirdly welcome tonight. Unfortunately, it was really sad walking, as the whole gang seemed to be running on empty in the hope department, and also in the water department.

The show opened on Maggie crying, and we had a sudden fear that this was going to be a repeat of last week, where we were flashing forward to Tyreese's death the entire time. If Glenn was about to be killed off, our TV sets were also about to be killed off via defenestration. Luckily, that was not the case, and Maggie was just crying about the loss of her sister and how generally horrible everything is, which we totally understand.

Everything really is horrible. First Beth was murdered by a damn living, breathing human, then Tyreese had an encounter with Noah's zombie brother, and now everyone's just really thirsty with no real direction aside from eventually making it to D.C. Michonne and Sasha are at odds. Father Gabriel's attempts to comfort Maggie are failing miserably. Daryl's burning himself with cigarette butts and crying. Times are hard.

"I truly do not know if things could get worse," Eugene says. "They can," Rosita assures him, which is the cue for the wild, hungry dogs to show up and immediately be shot by Sasha. In the road, the group finds a pile of water bottles and jugs with a note that says, "From a friend." They immediately assume it's poisoned, and don't even let Eugene try it.

Honestly, we would have probably just downed it all anyway, because if this is a world where other people are mean enough to poison water when everyone is under constant threat of being eaten by zombies, we don't really want to live in it anyway. Anyway, the water doesn't matter because it promptly starts to rain. They find shelter, and Rick tells a depressing but oddly comforting story about how his grandfather got through the war by waking up and accepting that he was already dead everyday. Then, he explained the title of the show! "We do what we need to do, and then we get to live…We tell ourselves we're the walking dead."

Then, of course, an entire horde of zombies attempts to join them in their barn, and we get one of the darkest, saddest, yet most determined sequences yet as the entire group does everything they can to hold the doors closed. The next morning, Maggie and Sasha venture outside to find all of the walkers impaled by trees from the storm. They sit to watch the sunrise, and they make a new friend! A clean friend! With a backpack! "My name is Aaron," the stranger says to the ends of their guns. He wants to talk to Rick. "I have good news."

Assuming this Aaron is the same Aaron from the comics, we have just been introduced to the show's first major gay character, confirming suspicions of who newcomer Ross Marquand would be playing. Hopefully this means good things and showers for everyone, because they sure could use them.