The recap of last night’s Walking Dead will be up shortly (Editor’s note: It’s up now), but in the meantime, we’re still processing the episode’s big finish. (Obviously, spoilers aplenty. If you haven’t watched yet, best to move on.) Here are the dozen questions, theories, and hopes that are keeping us from getting on with our lives.
1. Is the baby a boy or a girl? Sure, it’s a tragedy and all, but how are we to know whether it should wear a blue blood-streaked blanket or a pink one?
2. What does one feed a baby in a stank-ass prison? Unless sycophantic convict Axel displays a surprising talent for lactation, this could be trouble.
3. Poor Carl!
4. Uh-oh, is this going to make Carl “moody�
5. How much is Carl going to resent this baby? Older sisters and brothers often hate their new siblings for upsetting their sweet only-child setup, and that’s in the best of situations. Imagine how intrinsically annoyed a big bro would be if every time he looked at his sibling, he saw his mother, gutted and dead on a jail cell, partly by his own hand? Probably pretty annoyed.
6. Sort of strange that Lori didn’t ask Carl to relay any message to Rick, no? “Tell your dad [whatever]?â€
7. Are we going to have to watch Rick bury Lori in a Six Feet Under Nate-Lisa redux of weeping and non-embalming? Hope not!
8. Given that everyone on the show is already so damn sad, can we maybe skip ahead a bit? You can really see them getting stuck wallowing in the depression stage of grief, which is the Kübler-Ross equivalent of Hershel’s farm.
9. Poor T-Dog. He finally had his time to shine, but then Lori’s contractions start and by episode’s end he’s just another body on the pile. Always the plot device, never the character.
10. This episode has really upped the ante for “awkward birth†TV episodes. Delivering in the backseat of a car is just not gonna cut it anymore.
11. Thank goodness for Lori’s previous C-section, leaving a clear “knife goes here†line for Maggie to follow. Perhaps, in preparation for a possible apocalypse, we should all have incision-mark directional tattoos put all over our bodies so laymen with rusty knives will know where to cut us open in every possible situation: cut here to remove burst appendix, here for heart transplant, here to insert rudimentary cheek implants made out of wood …
12. The last scene, with everyone agonized and Rick staggering around as the agonizer-in-chief, was oddly reminiscent of the end of Monty Python’s “Dirty Fork†sketch. It was only lacking Hershel howling, “The wound! The wound!â€