Tonight’s episode of The Walking Dead season 5, episode 4 kept the spotlight on Beth for the duration of the hour. And boy, that hospital she’s at is weird.
The episode begins with Beth waking up and meeting Dr. Steven Edwards and Officer Dawn Lerner. The latter is the apparent leader. They’re in a hospital in Atlanta, and they claim Beth was out on the streets when they found her. She would’ve been dead if they didn’t save her, so “you owe us,” Dawn says. Uh oh.
She becomes an employee in the hospital and learns the ropes. For example, they dispose of bodies by sending them down the elevator chute. They know it’s not the most humane way to get rid of the bodies, but they don’t want to go outside too often.
Beth makes friends with the only doctor in the hospital – the brown-haired Joss Whedon lookalike named Steven – who kindly shares his guinea pig meal with her. While he looks like he could become an ally, by the end of the episode we know that Beth dislikes him greatly.
Things turn dark when Dawn brings in a patient who tried to jump off a building. She wants Steven to save him, but he deems it impossible. Pissed he can’t be saved, for some reason Dawn turns around and slaps Beth across the face.
Moments later, Dawn brings in another person who she’s eager to save – this time it’s a patient who was already in the hospital named Joan, and she needs her arm severed. Dawn is hellbent on saving her – maybe because she’s an object for the men to use, as we find out later.
Following a bloody operation on Joan, Beth goes to grab another new pair of scrubs and meets Noah, a Virginian who calls himself a lollipop guild member. He came here in search of his uncle, but now wants to leave to get back to his mom.
Next Beth gets some personal time with Officer Gorman, who is the definition of creepy. He begins to hit on Beth and forces a lollipop into her mouth when, thankfully, the doctor steps in and breaks up Gorman’s forceful ways. In this scene we learn that Gorman once claimed Joan as his own.
“Why do you stay here?” Beth asks the Doctor. This place is a safe home, and Dawn saved him, he says. “As bad as [the hospital] gets, it’s still better than down there,” he explains.
In the next scene, the doctor instructs Beth to give a patient a particular drug before clocking out for the night. She does, but he immediately begins seizing and dies. The doctor claims privately to Beth that he didn’t instruct her to give the patient that drug. Why is he tricking her? (More on that in a moment.) Always a gentleman, Noah takes the blame for Beth. He gets a good punch in the face for it.
But Dawn tells Beth that she knows it wasn’t Noah who screwed up.. even though she beat Noah up for it anyway. Dawn LOVES hitting people.
Everything happening in here is nuts, Beth decides. She tells Noah she wants to leave the hospital with him.
In order to do so, Noah asks Beth to break into Dawn’s office to grab a key they need. She goes into the office and finds Joan dead under the desk caused by an apparent suicide. The poor woman didn’t want to deal with Gorman anymore. To make matters worse, Officer Gorman catches Beth breaking into the office. He says he won’t tell so long as she has sex with him. She agrees as Joan begins turning into a zombie, so Beth knocks Gorman out with Dawn’s jar of lollipops and puts him right within reach of Joan, who promptly eats him. It’s sweet payback for Joan, who appears to have been abused by Gorman in the past.
As things begin to turn chaotic within the hospital, Noah and Beth begin their escape through the elevator shaft. Beth climbs safely down but Noah has to take an unfortunate fall onto a pile of rotting bodies.
They make their way out into the blinding sunlight with Beth leading the way. While Noah makes it out beyond the hospital fence, the cops catch up with Beth and arrest her. She watches Noah break free with a smile, but we’re worried that he’s going to have a difficult time getting home with that bad leg.
“No one’s coming Dawn. No one’s. Coming,” Beth tells Dawn when they speak in her office. Disgruntled, Joan takes a picture on her desk and slams it into Beth’s face. We noticed a theme this episode: Dawn is quite abusive.
Later, Steven is inspecting Beth’s new bruises when the latter drops a revelation: Steven made Beth kill the patient because he was a doctor, too. If the patient lived, Steven wouldn’t have been the only doctor in the hospital. He wants to be valuable.
The episode concludes with Beth ready to kill the doctor when suddenly a new patient enters: Carol. No! Now the doctor can’t die.
As previews show, next week’s episode will follow (at least) Abraham, Eugene, and their bus to D.C.
What’d you think of ‘The Walking Dead’ season 5, episode 4?
Beth proved her purpose on tonight’s episode, but this storyline is still far from over. It seems like Beth will have to walk a tightrope as she tries to escape with Carol before Dawn goes completely psychotic on her.
Thinking back to episode 3, where Daryl said “come on out,” it seems likely now that he is addressing both Beth and Carol.
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