“NEVER AGAIN NEVER TRUST WE FIRST, ALWAYS.” The mantras painted onto the walls of a makeshift, candlelit memorial chapel were not exactly hospitable. As it turned out, Terminus was not quite the sanctuary that the straggling survivors of “The Walking Dead” expected.
Season 4 of this dystopian action-adventure series on AMC ended on Sunday without revealing what was wrong with Terminus, the smugly self-sufficient community that lured the heroes to a train-yard enclave with promises of peace and safety. The friendly welcome cooled off fast: At episode’s end, they were left locked up in a boxcar, awaiting an unknown fate.
Over four seasons, these survivors have faced every kind of horror and twisted form of savagery. So it is only a question of time before the show taps into cannibalism.
Nothing is made clear about what happens next, but as is so often the case with “The Walking Dead,” one thing is certain: Humans are a greater menace than the zombies who took over the world and brought civilization to its knees. Everything is gone: law, order, money, farms, shops, highways, schools, hospitals, civility and trust. Killing isn’t a choice, it’s a survival skill. The heroes question themselves on whether they had a good enough reason.
This season, in particular, the show’s main characters navigated a binary moral universe divided between survivors who retain a vestige of humanity and survivors who might as well be monsters.
Rick (Andrew Lincoln), who has endured his own deep descents into inhumanity, came closer than ever to acting like a zombie in this episode: He overpowered an enemy by ripping open his throat with his bare teeth.
There was a group of cannibals in the graphic novels that inspired this TV series. More important, on a show that is constantly whittling down the ways survivors can cling to decency, becoming a cannibal would be the next worst thing to being a zombie. Zombies eat human flesh raw, preferably torn off the still-thrashing bone. Cannibals eat it cooked, and they may even prefer the meat of free-range humans; the flavor hasn’t been affected by stress and industrial feed.
The glib, self-assured men and women who welcomed Rick and the others to Terminus seemed more like participants at a TED Talk conference than members of a Donner Party. One of them gave a philanthropic explanation for why the community welcomes strangers. But his wording could also have another, more anthropophagic meaning. “The more people become a part of us, we get stronger,” he said. “It’s how we survive.”
Either interpretation would explain why the people of Terminus didn’t shoot to kill when Rick and the others tried to escape. Possibly, they didn’t want to kill innocent people. Or they didn’t want their fresh game riddled with bullets.
As they were trying to flee, Rick and the others passed a kind of slaughter yard: bloodied strips of flesh and heaps of bone that somehow didn’t look like exterminated zombies or animal carcasses.
It could be misdirection, of course, but Sunday night’s episode repeatedly underscored the theme of hunger, from the creepily smiling woman at Terminus who cheerfully flipped meat on a grill, to Rick and Michonne (Danai Gurira) discussing their dinner on the road to the sanctuary.
“Have you noticed, it’s all we talk about anymore — food?” Rick said over a scrawny rabbit they trapped in the woods and roasted. There were flashbacks to happier times at the prison when Hershel (Scott Wilson) was alive and teaching Rick and Rick’s son, Carl (Chandler Riggs), how to grow crops for food.
Cannibalism is conceivable in a world where resources are so scarce and hunting so dangerous that characters are prepared to fight to the death over an animal: A dispute over a carcass put Daryl (Norman Reedus), one of Rick’s most loyal comrades, in the thrall of a vicious gang, the same thugs who drove Rick to bite his way to freedom ... and Terminus.
“The Walking Dead” posits a postapocalyptic landscape where both social comity and social conflict are things of the past; the few traces, like the redneck racism of Daryl’s brother, are vestigial. People of all kinds — men and women; blacks, whites and Asians — band together by moral affinity, not gender, race or tribe. And almost every episode tests the heroes’ sanity and their sense of justice. A question Rick poses to strangers — “How many people did you kill?” — is really a character test, a measure of whether a person feels enough regret to keep count.
Carl, like his father, falls short. He once killed a boy who was trying to surrender. But like his father, he still feels guilt, telling Michonne, “I’m just another monster, too.”
“The Walking Dead” is a parable about the survival of the fittest that is also consumed with the moral fitness of the survivors. The best people aren’t always good, but unlike their enemies, they can still feel bad.
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