Skip to Content

Good news, fans! Beth Greene isn’t dead! She’s just living as a captive in some weird post-apocalyptic indentured servitude and planning how she’ll kill every last one of the jerks keeping her locked away from finding her people.

That’s the two-sentence summary of The Walking Dead Season 5 Episode 4. Read on for a more thorough discussion, or go watch The Walking Dead online. I won’t even try to stop you.

Beth woke up in a hospital scene not unlike the scene in which Rick woke up to discover himself smack in the middle of a Zombie Apocalypse. It was actually quite eerie how similar the two scenes were, and yet something tells me they were supposed to be that way.

Symmetry and all, you know?

So Beth is in this hospital. The people who took her run the joint and they say that they’re “saving” people who are “out there” and in danger. Except they stick people in the trunks of cars instead of back seats so something tells me that’s not true.

What they have going on there is an indentured servitude system where you’re there for as long as it takes you to pay off your debt to them for saving your life, even though you didn’t ask to be saved. The trouble is that you have to eat to live and eating their food means you owe them more and so you can check out any time you like but you can never leave.

Eagles reference, FTW.

These people, Dawn, Gorman, Edwards, they all keep underestimating Beth, thinking she’s a wallflower incapable of surviving on her own in the world, and while that may have been the case for The Walking Dead Season 2 Beth, that’s not the case now. She’s stronger, smarter, and decidedly determined to get back to her people.

So determined she’ll kill anyone who gets in her way, particularly the rape-y cop Gorman who claims the girls brought into the hospital as his own. He got the absolute best death possible for someone as despicable as he was and I can’t say I’m sad to see him go.

What we’re seeing more and more as the seasons progress is that the living are way, way more dangerous than the dead. Sure, the dead want to eat you, but the living want to use you for their own gain.

Dawn continued talking about how everything they’re doing in the hospital is for the greater good, but that’s just not possibly true. I kept wanting Beth to shout that she was stronger than they gave her credit, to get defiant, but then I think I love the subtle ways she took charge of her own destiny a lot more than if she’d been a loud brat.

She helped Noah escape the hospital by allowing herself to be captured so that she could distract the guards to keep them from going after him. Might he be the person with Daryl outside the church?

That’s definitely possible, particularly considering that Carol is now inside the hospital. What I envision happening is Carol and Daryl tracked the cross-car to the hospital, found Noah, and Noah filled them in on what’s going on inside. Carol faked being injured in order to get in because they take in more women than men and Noah doesn’t know that Gorman is dead.

Carol will help blow up the hospital from the inside out, rescue Beth, and they’ll all rendezvous on the road to D.C.

No matter what, and no matter how confusing this timeline feels for my chronological brain, I’m glad we have a solid story for where Beth’s been for the past few weeks, and I’m glad she’s not suffering some sort of Stockholm Syndrome. Now let’s get her back to her group.