'The Walking Dead' Recap: 'The Walls Can Hold Together... Can You?'

Warning: This recap for the “Now” episode of The Walking Dead contains spoilers.

No, we still don’t know if Glenn is alive or dead.

Glenn was a major part of this week’s storyline, though, as his absence sparked the emotions of his loved ones. But “Now” mostly provided a look at how the women of Alexandria are becoming the most fierce group in town. Even with just the briefest appearance by Michonne and a totally MIA Carol, Deanna, Maggie, Denise, Tara, and budding badass Jessie are proving themselves to be major factors in how — if — the town can rebound from recent tragedies and evolve into the kind of community Deanna had always planned it would be.

Deanna and Spencer

Deanna’s still in a state of shock about the Wolves’ attack on Alexandria, and she watches over the rest of the town trying to deal with the fallout: Tobin and Bruce are loading the dead bodies of their fellow citizens onto a wagon and taking them to the graveyard, while Michonne tells Maggie about Glenn. Glenn told her he’d find a way to send a signal if he got stuck, Michonne tells his wife, and just as Deanna overhears that conversation, a voice starts yelling from outside the walls.

It’s Rick, yelling, “Open the gate now!” as he’s being chased by a good portion of the quarry herd of walkers. He runs right at the Alexandria gate, body-checking one of the walkers along the way, and reaches the entrance just as Michonne opens it and closes it just as quickly behind him.

Shortly after his return, with the paltry number of surviving townsfolk gathered to look at the walls that are now surrounded by the herd — 20 deep, as Rick will soon point out — Rick tries to rally everyone to the Ricktatorship way of moving forward.

“I know you’re scared. You haven’t seen anything like this,” he says. “The panel the truck hit seems safe… we reinforced it. Either way, the walls can hold together… can you?”

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He tells them the others will soon return, and for now, they need to keep the noise and lights to a minimum, so as not to stir up the walkers. Someone in the crowd shouts that the town is now like a graveyard, and that angers Aaron. He tells them the whole herd of quarry walkers were headed towards Alexandria, but Rick’s plan stopped at least half of them. He says he ignored Daryl’s suggestions while they were out scouting, and that led to the two of them walking into the Wolves’ trap, which resulted in Aaron losing his pack and the Wolves getting their hands on Aaron’s recruitment photos. He says that led them to the town, and he takes responsibility for that.

Deanna walks away, silently, not bothering to turn around even when Tobin calls after her. “There’ll be more to talk about,” says Rick, who’s also surprised by Deanna’s detachment.

At the food pantry, Deanna also stands by silently as Olivia tries to stave off a run at the groceries. The townsfolk all seem to think the future is hopeless, so why ration food? Olivia pleads with them not to gobble everything up, but they push past her, and only an intervention by Spencer, Deanna’s only remaining family, stops them.

“Doing this will start us down a road where nothing matters, where no one else matters, and then we’ll all look back at this moment right now as when we destroyed this place,” he says, shaming the Alexandrians into returning the canned goods to the pantry shelves. Deanna looks proud, and it inspires her to get out her blueprint designs for Alexandria, and make some notes of where crops — corn, barley, alfalfa, and wheat — should be planted, where a mill should be built, where there should be places for education, about creating a guiding document and an election. Then she writes, “DOLOR HIC TIBI PRODERIT OLIM” on the document, which means “Someday this pain will be useful to you.”

Her burst of optimism is shaken by the sound of a glass breaking, which turns out to be Spencer, in the kitchen, on his way to getting drunk. Deanna sees that he’s taken a basket of supplies from the communal pantry, and he says he deserves the goods, because he stopped the others from taking everything. It’s not a big deal if it’s just one person, he says. “One last celebration, because they were right, Mom, and you know it,” he tells her. “We’re all gonna be dead real soon.”

He also spits at his devastated mother: “You’re the reason we’re so screwed!… We were never safe here. But you didn’t want to see that… What happened, to Dad, to Aiden… that’s all you!”

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That night, Deanna is returning from a trip to the pantry herself when a walker sneaks up behind her, startling her into dropping her basket of food. Looking for something to use as a weapon, she picks up a giant shard of a broken bottle and stabs the walker nearly two dozen times, until she’s covered in blood from head to toe. Rick runs up and stops her. He says Carol told him she’d killed one of the Wolves and couldn’t find the body, which is probably the walker who snuck up on Deanna.

“I wanna live. I want this place to stay standing,” Deanna tells Rick, who tells her she needs to lead the others.

“They don’t need me, Rick. What they need is you,” she says, as he helps her pack up her groceries.

“What I wanted for this place… was that really just pie-in-the-sky?” she asks him.

“No,” he assures her.

She strolls past the front gate later that night, and with the walkers trying to claw their way in, she looks at them and bangs her hand on the gate. She walks on, with a new look of determination on her face, and she passes one of the walls, which has a stream of blood dripping down it.

Rick and Jessie

Jessie drags the dead Wolf from her home and is digging a grave for her in the makeshift cemetery when Rick comes by and tells her to stop; they don’t bury killers inside the walls, he reminds her. He says they’ll pile up the bodies and deal with them when the others — Glenn, Daryl, Abraham, and Sasha — return.

She later tries to lure Sam to come downstairs with a fresh batch of cookies, but he tells her nothing traumatic happened to him, and he goes back to his room. She might have made a stronger impression on some of the other Alexandrians after she passed by one of the houses and saw that its resident had become a walker. With several frightened townsfolk watching, she opens the front door and gently stabs the turned woman in the head. Then she tells her neighbors: “I used to not want to see the way things are… But this is what life looks like now. We have to see it. We have to fight it. If we don’t fight, we die.”

Rick hears about her speech, and visits her that night in her garage. Jessie: “You heard about that? I wasn’t saying there isn’t a future. There’s gotta be. Tell me there’s more.”

Rick kisses her instead, and she kisses him, but the camera pulls back to make it look like someone is watching the two… like, maybe someone who would not be happy to see the man who killed his father? The man whose son, he thinks, stole his girlfriend, smooching up on his mama?

Maggie and Aaron

Aaron watches some of his friends painting on the Alexandria walls, and he tears up when he sees they’re marking the names of the people who’ve died, including, they assume, Glenn and Nicholas. Aaron also notices Maggie gearing up for what he assumes is a rescue mission outside, so he insists on going with her, and shows her a safer way to get out past the herd: a sewer tunnel that runs underground and that should drop them out on the other side of the herd.

Maggie protests initially, but accepts Aaron’s offer, and as they make their way through the tunnel, she says, “If he’s alive…”

“If?” Aaron asks.

“He told Michonne he would’ve found some way to signal us if he got out,” she replies. “If he’s alive, he needs my help. That’s why I’m doing this. And if he’s dead, I don’t wanna be waiting on him.”

She adds that none of this is Aaron’s fault, and as they get deeper into the tunnel, which Aaron says he hasn’t been in since the beginning, a pair of walkers — old, pale, sewer-dwelling walkers — jump out at them as they try to move a ladder. They fend them off, but Aaron suffers a fairly big cut on his noggin, and they move towards another exit. They get to the end gate to see a swarm of walkers waiting, and Maggie decides they both should turn back. Aaron offers to go on alone.

“No! It’s over,” Maggie tells him. “I burned his last picture, because I said I wasn’t going to need it anymore, because I was never going to be away from him again. I’m pregnant. He didn’t want me to go out there, and I said yes. And if I would have gone, if I was with him, maybe I could have helped him. I don’t know if he’s alive… I have to live with that. You do, too.”

Aaron hugs her, with the walkers growling and trying to claw at them just on the other side of the gate.

Back inside the town walls, Maggie and Aaron look at the panel with the names of the dead. She starts wiping Glenn’s name off the wall, and Aaron joins her.

“When he gets back, it’s worth mentioning: Aaron, Erin, works for a boy or a girl, depending on the spelling,” Aaron says. “Just sayin’.”

Carl and Ron

Carl finds Ron sitting on the ground, stabbing a knife over and over into the grass. Carl asks if he’s okay, and if he’s seen Enid. Ron says no, and Carl shares that he thinks she went over the wall and is now trapped outside because of the herd. Carl wants to go find her and needs Ron’s help. He points out he’s not asking for himself; he’s asking for Enid, Ron’s friend.

“My girlfriend,” Ron corrects him. “’Cuz she was, anyway, right?” He says he told Enid not to keep going outside the wall, that it was dangerous, but Carl argues it isn’t if you know what you’re doing. Ron tells him he’s not letting him go; he’ll tell Rick what he’s planning if he tries. They get into a shoving match.

“I’ll tell your dad, he’ll go out there to find you, other people will, too, and then someone is gonna die,” says a suddenly savvy Ron. “You saved my life, and now I’m saving yours.”

Ron goes off to talk to Rick on the lookout platform, and he does tell him about Carl’s plan to find Enid. He tells him he last saw him on their porch, with Judith. Then he tells Rick he was right, what he said at the quarry, that Ron needs to learn to protect himself, his mom, and his brother. He asks Rick to teach him how to shoot a gun. Rick takes the bullets out of his gun and begins telling Ron how to aim it.

Taking the bullets out of the gun: Did Rick do it because he didn’t want Ron to accidentally shoot anyone, or make noise that would rile up the walkers? Or because he suspects Ron might have some side motivation in learning how to use a gun?

Denise and Tara

Denise continues to be frightened and frustrated about her lack of practical medical knowledge, but she’s reading the medical texts in the office to try to find a way to treat Scott, the supply runner who was shot by Sturgess. Tara comes in to encourage Denise just as she’s about to give up, and it works: Denise figures out the key to helping Scott heal is to drain his infected wound, and to celebrate, she finds Tara sitting on her porch and plants a big kiss on her. So… new couple?

Zombie Bites:

* Aaron is sure his recruitment photos drew the Wolves to Alexandria, but if the theories prove to be true that Enid is tied to the marauders, Aaron’s photos probably had nothing to do with the attack.

* PS: Where is Carol?! We haven’t seen her since her “JSS” heroics. Did the Wolves’ attack leave her even more shaken than we saw during the episode?

* The blood dripping down the wall as Deanna walks by… thoughts? Is it someone trying to return to Alexandria, or leave town? Could it be Morgan’s Wolf, escaped from the room Morgan has him locked in?

* Is it possible Rick and Jessie can get a little romance going? Or will something happen with Ron, or maybe with Ron and Carl, that will come between them?

OK, Dead-heads, let’s hear your reactions to “Now”: Did the episode, specifically Maggie’s reaction to the situation with Glenn, make you think more or less that he might still be alive?

The Walking Dead airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on AMC.