"Still" is the twelfth episode of the fourth season of AMC's The Walking Dead. It is the forty-seventh episode of the series overall. It premiered on March 2, 2014. It was written by Angela Kang and directed by Julius Ramsay.
Plot[]
Faced with the day-to-day survival of life outside shelter, a simple request by someone in the group leads to a bizarre but enlightening mission.
Synopsis[]
In the middle of the night, Daryl and Beth find an abandoned car on the side of the road. Hearing an approaching horde of walkers, the two take refuge in the trunk and spend the night inside as lightening bolts allow numerous walkers to be seen passing by. The next morning, they scavenge the car for supplies before moving on.
Later, Daryl is hunting for food while Beth makes a fire at a camp that they have set up. After failing to catch a squirrel, Daryl manages to kill a large snake. He brings it back to the camp, where he and Beth cook and eat it. After she is finished, Beth tells Daryl she wants a drink. He gives her a bottle of water, but she tells him that she wants alcohol, explaining that Hershel wouldn't allow it. When Daryl doesn't respond, she angrily takes her knife and leaves.
As Beth wanders through the forest, walkers appear and she is forced to hide. She successfully tricks the walkers by tossing a stone into some nearby brush, distracting them. Daryl then arrives and leads her back to the camp, which angers her.
Beth indignantly tells Daryl that she can take care of herself, and flips him off for good measure. However, they leave the camp together and stumble onto a golf course. A group of walkers emerge from the woods, and Beth decides to go to the country club at the edge of the golf course, believing that it will have alcohol. Once inside, they find three walkers hanging from the ceiling by their necks, while bodies of people with gunshots in the head are scattered on the floor. As Beth looks for alcohol, Daryl begins collecting stacks of cash and jewellery that had been scattered across the floor. The walkers from the golf course attempt to enter the club, which forces the two further inside the club.
As they work their way deeper into the building, Beth manages to find an unopened bottle of alcohol. However, a walker attacks her from the shadows and she is forced to use the bottle as a makeshift weapon. The bottle breaks, but she manages to stab the walker in the head with her knife. She sees Daryl watching and sarcastically thanks him for his help. Daryl simply reminds her that she said she could take care of herself and that she did. Beth notices writing on the wall saying, "Welcome to the dogtrot", and sees more bodies of people who (like the others) apparently committed mass suicide.
They find a shop further inside the building. Daryl attempts to loot the cash register, and begins taking anything that might have had monetary value before the plague. Beth walks up, and they both see the top half of a female corpse. It is deliberately posed on top of a pair of mannequin legs, with an open shirt and a sign reading "Rich Bitch" pinned to its chest. Beth seems upset by the display, presumably because it is immodest and disrespectful. She asks Daryl to help her take it down. He initially communes that it doesn't matter, because the woman is dead. Seeing that it matters to Beth, he throws a sheet over the corpse so it is hidden.
Meanwhile, Beth finds a clean shirt & cardigan and puts them on. As they continue searching, a grandfather clock that they passed earlier begins to chime. This gets the attention of every walker in the vicinity. Daryl and Beth attempt to run, but reach a dead end when they get to the locker room and Daryl begins killing walkers using his crossbowuntil a walker grabs onto it. He grabs a nearby golf club and uses this and his knife to dispose of them, until he reaches the last one. In a fit of rage, Daryl deliberately beats the walker with his golf club without killing it, before smashing its face. In the process, Beth's new clean white cardigan and shirt are splashed with blood. She removes the outer layer and they continue to the bar.
Beth proceeds to search for alcohol, while Daryl continues collecting things. Beth finds a half-empty bottle of peach schnapps, and asks Daryl if it's any good. He says no, but she seems determined to drink it anyway. Unable to find a clean glass, Beth begins to break down in tears before Daryl angrily walks to where she is sitting and smashes the bottle on the floor, saying that her first drink will be something better.
He then takes her to a rundown shack that he claimed to have found previously when scouting with Michonne. He enters the house with Beth, retrieves crates of moonshine from it, and pours her a glass. Beth drinks the moonshine then offers Daryl a drink, but he refuses saying that someone needs to have their wits about them.
Beth then convinces Daryl to play the "I Never" game, during which Daryl becomes intoxicated. Beth then says that she has never been to jail, implying that Daryl had. He then becomes furious asking if that is how she sees him, before acting increasingly belligerent and urinating on the floor while shouting. Beth tells him he needs to stay quiet, but he then forcefully takes Beth outside to teach her how to use his crossbow on the walker outside. He shoots the walker in the chest, pinning it to a tree, and tries to force Beth to kill it with his crossbow. She refuses and instead stabs it in the head with her knife. They then begin arguing, during which Daryl yells at Beth for being lost on the road and only wanting to have a drink like a "dumb college girl", and Beth demands that Daryl stop pretending not to care about anyone.
Daryl then breaks down and reveals that he felt directly responsible for Hershel's death. He tells her how he had had a shot at the Governor, but didn't take it and that if only he had kept looking for the Governor with Michonne maybe then they could have saved Hershel's life. Beth embraces him from behind as he continues to sob.
Later in the night, Daryl and Beth share stories of their respective families, during which Beth tells Daryl that he would ultimately be the last person standing after everything was over. She tells Daryl that he’s going to miss her so much when she’s gone, which seems like fore-shadowing. Daryl then finally answers the question that Beth (and previously Zack) had been asking regarding what Daryl did before the apocalypse. He tells her that he didn’t do anything, but that he would just follow his brother, Merle, and do as he said. Beth then suggests, "We should burn it down", helping Daryl erase all his past unwanted self and maybe find some closure regarding his abusive upbringing in a place just like that one. Daryl smiles and tells her that they will need more alcohol.
They empty all of the moonshine around the inside of the house and prepare to light it. Daryl offers Beth the matches and she lights the money that Daryl had collected earlier, throwing it into the house. The house begins to burn and Beth and Daryl both flip off the house while watching it burn, before turning and leaving.
Other Cast[]
Uncredited[]
- Coleman Youmans as Pine Vista Employee
Deaths[]
- Many unnamed country club survivors (Confirmed Fate; 10 Alive, 7 Zombified)
- 1 snake
- 1 possum
Trivia[]
- The title of the episode, "Still", refers to Daryl and Beth's drunken moonshine confessions, as well as the discovery of the moonshine still.
- On the Talking Dead, it was revealed that the hanging walkers in the club were killed by the staff of the club during a "class struggle".
- The song that plays during the ending scene is "Up the Wolves" by The Mountain Goats.
- This episode features the fewest number of actors thus far in The Walking Dead.
- This is also the only episode to feature no guest actors.
- This is the first episode to feature only two main cast members.
- This is the first episode to feature no characters with comic counterparts, having Daryl and Beth as the only characters to appear.
- Emily Kinney and Norman Reedus confirmed that the snake they were eating during shooting was actually eel. Norman had cut off the rattle from the snake during shooting and gave it to Andrew Lincoln.
- At the country club, Beth picks up a spoon with Washington, D.C. decorated on it, hinting at the group's future journey to the location, and also the fact that Beth was not present in that storyline.
- This episode is a posthumous dedication to Sarah Elizabeth Jones, a camera operator killed in an accident during the filming of Midnight Rider in 2014.
- According to Denise Huth, the photos of the country club's presidents are staff that work on the show.
- As revealed on Talking Dead, John Sanders, the prop master, was one of the faces that Daryl was throwing the darts at.
- An easter egg to a character from Breaking Bad, Jesse Pinkman, was added in this episode, when Daryl, and Beth engaged in the conversation on the porch, Daryl recalled his experience with Merle's dealer, "...a janky little white guy. Tweaker. One day we were at his house. Watching TV, watching this show. Merle was talking about all this dumb stuff about it. Turns out it was the tweaker's kid's favorite show. He never sees this kid, so he felt guilty about it or somethin'. He pulls a gun, sticks it right here. He says, "I'm gonna kill you, bitch!"."
- This is the first episode of Season 4 to feature no deaths.
Episode Highlights[]
TBA
Goofs/Errors[]
- In the golf club Beth is wearing her new yellow polo shirt and white cardigan. Daryl hits walker blood all over her cardigan. In the next scene she takes the cardigan off and the t-shirt underneath, which was covered by the cardigan, has blood all over it. Back in the forest after this the shirt is clean again.
- In the scene where Daryl takes on the incoming walkers, there are some shots of him killing the walker with his backpack on and other shots of him killing walkers without his backpack on.