Someone armed with a flashlight is coming out to the fence in the middle of the night and feeding live rats to the walkers.

Tyreese and Karen have really hit it off.  They’re making out like teenagers and he starts singing “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” to her – oh, it’s love alright.  She doesn’t want to spend the night with him, though, and heads to the washroom.  She hears some sounds, looks around and doesn’t see anything.  She then goes to her cell and turns in, as we see the shadow of the zombified Patrick pass by the sheet at her door.  Patrick is wandering the halls and, after hearing a cough,  finally chooses a cell to enter, then takes a bite out of one of the new – and now zombified – members of the group.

Morning comes and Rick is in the washroom with baby Judith. He then wakes Carl and tells him to get ready for breakfast.  Glenn is in the guard’s tower, where Maggie is sleeping, and snaps a picture of her with an old Polaroid camera.  She wakes up, looks at the photo and tells him to get rid of it.  He just smiles and goes off to do his perimeter check.  Michonne is leaving on her horse, headed out on her hunt for the Governor, and asks Rick and Carl what they’d like her to look for  while she’s away, laughing over stale M&Ms.  The father and son are working in the garden  and Carl asks his dad if he can have his gun back.  He tells him that he’s been trying to do better, but Rick isn’t ready to return the weapon yet.  Just then they hear loud noises from inside the prison, gunshots and banging.  Michonne hears it, too, and turns around to help.  The walkers are swarming the gate and she’s knocked to the ground before she can make it safely back inside.  Carl and Maggie help her back to her feet, and she hobbles back with them on an injured ankle.   Inside the prison, everyone is battling the walkers who seemed to have come out of nowhere.  Daryl neutralizes Patrick while Carol tends to Ryan, one of the newcomers.  She thinks that she can save him from his bite by amputating his arm, but she notices that he’s also been bit on the neck and knows he’s going to die.   His daughters enter the cell so that they all can say goodbye.  Carol promises him that she’ll take care of the girls, then he dies.  She look at the two girls and starts to neutralize Ryan.  The older daughter says that it’s her job and moves toward her father.  She can’t do it, though and Carol has to finish him off.

Carol goes out to the fence to find Ryan’s daughters, Lizzie and Mika.  She explains to the distraught girls that she promised to protect them but then turns to the older one and tells her that she lost her nerve.  She has to trust her gut and act fast every time – it’s life and death.  If they want to live you have to be strong and she was weak.  Mika tells Carol,   “She’s messed up.  She’s not weak.”  Carol also has a conversation with Carl, asking him if he’s told his father about what she was teaching the children in the library.  He says that he hasn’t and she asks him not to – not to lie to his Dad,  just not to say anything.

Hershel, along with the new house doctor, examine Patrick and determine that he, along with Violet the pig had some sort of virus or strain of flu.  Hershel notes that Asian birds are known to carry viruses.   The council meets and they decide that anyone who may have been exposed – which is most of Cell Block C, should be quarantined.  The only place they can think of that might work is on death row (ironic).  Karen is back inside, walking with Tyreese.  Hershel hears her cough and tells her that she has to be separated from the rest of them until they can figure out what this is and whether this can be cured or not.  Daryl heads outside to begin burying the dead.   Rick joins him and Daryl expresses how much he would like Rick to take a more active role in the leadership of the group again.  When Rick says that he’s afraid of becoming what he had been like before, and how it affected Carl, Daryl says “When the shit hits, you’re standing there with the shovel.”

All hell breaks loose – Maggie’s screaming and the walkers are moving forward with enough force to bend the fence.  Everyone who can runs for the fence and starts to fight off the walkers, but the group is losing the battle.  Rick tells Daryl to get the pickup truck and off they go.  Sasha notices that there are rat carcasses strewn along the fence-line and wonder what crackpot would want to feed the walkers – as do we.    Daryl’s driving the truck with Rick riding on the trailer and they leave the compound.  Beginning just a few feet from the walkers, Daryl stops and Rick pulls one of the pigs from a crate, cuts its leg and sacrifices it to the walkers.  They repeat this every hundred feet or so until they run out of pigs.

Michonne is in her cell, exercising, while Beth walks the halls, singing to baby Judith.   Michonne is angry with herself, telling Beth that what she did was stupid and that Maggie and Carl shouldn’t have helped her.  Beth says that they did it because they care about her, but Michonne says caring gets you hurt.  Beth responds, “When you care about people, hurt is part of the package.”  The baby’s diaper needs changing and Beth hands her to Michonne.  At first Michonne looks uncomfortable with the baby, the, draw her close and starts to cry.  Oh my, our warrior queen was a mother.  Beth looks in and then turns away, to give Michonne her moment with the crying infant.

Rick is breaking down the pig sty when Carl happens by.  The boy asks if the pigs made the people sick, but Rick thinks it may have been people who made the pigs sick.  He tells his son that they’re going to have to stay away from Judy for a while.  Carl decides to tell Rick about what Carol is doing with the children and says that he thinks his dad should let her.  As Rick ours gasoline over the sty, he says that he won’t stop her and he won;t say anything to the children’s parents.  He then sets the sty on fire.  He hands Carl his gun, then puts on his belt and holsters his own.  The sheriff is back.

Tyreese has a bouquet of flowers for Karen, but when he reaches her cell, she’s missing, but he sees a trail of blood leading outside.  There he finds two bodies, still smoldering from a recent fire – one is Karen’s.

A whole bunch of people died in this episode, yet the rats and the three little pigs bothered me the most.  Go figure.

Empress