'The Walking Dead' Recap: 'I Ain't Who You Think'

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

Again, no, we still don’t know if Glenn is alive or dead. But we did get a Daryl-intensive episode this week, a surprising — as in out-of-left-field surprising — new romance, and hints at new storylines and characters that almost certainly will involve Mr. Rhee’s status, with just two more episodes remaining in the first half of Season 6.

The Herd

Daryl on his motorcycle and Sasha and Abraham in their hoopty car are leading the herd (that portion of it that didn’t follow Rick, anyway) away from Alexandria, and the trip seems to be moving along uneventfully until shots are fired at the bike and the car.

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Daryl’s knocked off his bike, but manages to get back on and drive away, with a car following him, and its passengers continuing to shoot at him. There’s another car following Sasha and Abraham, with its passengers shooting at them, so Sasha drives through a giant wall, and she and Abe get out (unscathed) and start shooting at the car behind them. They shoot those dudes to death, and Daryl continues his getaway, driving through a pack of walkers and into a forest, where he hides until the car following him drives on by.

Who were the shooters, who seemed to be lying in wait for someone? We don’t know, but in the quick glances we get, they don’t appear to have “W”s on their foreheads.

Into the Woods

Daryl goes further into the woods, and drops down beside a burnt body wearing a melted motorcycle helmet. He tries to reach Sasha and Abe on the radio, but gets no response. He realizes his arm is bleeding, then camouflages the bike with leaves and takes off on foot with his crossbow.

A short distance later, he runs into two women, who raise their hands up and tell him, “You found us, OK? We earned what we took.” But Daryl doesn’t turn around before a guy standing behind him hits him in the head and knocks him out.

Daryl floats in and out of consciousness, catching glimpses of the trio talking around a campfire, and when he fully awakens the next day, his hands are tied together and Forest Guy is holding a gun to his face. “I ain’t who you think,” Daryl tells him.

“Say something else… go ahead,” Forest Guy says, and Daryl remains silent. He tells Daryl they’re moving, and to follow the two women — the youngest, a short-haired blonde named Tina, and the other… we know her only as Forest Girl, for now.

They walk through the woods, and Forest Guy explains, “We’re reasonable people. Everybody’s got their code.” He says maybe they’ll give Daryl to “them.”

“You feel you gotta kneel? That’s fair enough. We don’t,” FG continues. As they pass though the woods, littered with burnt bodies, Forest Guy and Forest Girl share that they lived nearby before the apocalypse. When it all started, Tina was in Washington D.C., and they were there, dealing with the walkers. A lot of them had congregated in the forest, so Forest Guy and Girl decided to torch the whole area, which drew more walkers from town, who came and walked right into the fire.

Forest Guy killed the rest of the walkers with an ax, and they thought they were doing their part to make sure the living defeated the walking dead. They assumed other people were taking care of herds of walkers elsewhere. “We were stupid,” Forest Guy says.

“Y’all don’t think you’re being stupid right now?” Daryl asks. Forest Guy doesn’t respond well, taking Daryl’s question as a threat.

“Are you saying I should kill you?” he asks, putting the gun to Daryl’s head. “I mean, are you gonna try to pull something on us? Are we just being thick here by not removing all doubt? Right now, by not pulling this trigger, is that a mistake? You tell me … am I being stupid?”

Daryl tells him he’s not, but adds that he needs to be somewhere, and offers to make a deal to help Forest Guy, Girl, and Tina out. But Forest Guy insists Daryl is “one of them,” and tells him to keep moving.

Photos: ‘The Walking Dead’ Dead: Where Are They Now?

The foursome reach their destination: the Pattrick Fuel Company offices, a fenced-in area that is now the home of several walkers. Forest Guy had led the others there hoping to meet up with Patty — the Pattrick Fuel Company owner? — but quickly surmises that Patty is gone. Forest Guy and Girl say they need a new plan, which is to flee to somewhere else; Tina, who’s looking woozy, tells them they don’t have to do this for her. She faints, and Daryl uses the distraction as his opportunity to run away with their supply bag. Forest Guy shoots at him, but Daryl makes it safely away, where he unties his hands and again, unsuccessfully, tries to contact Sasha and Abe on the radio. He gets his crossbow out of the bag, and sees something else inside: a cooler filled with insulin.

He backtracks with the bag and confronts Tina and her friends, with his crossbow drawn. He demands the gun, and tells Forest Guy to give him a figurine he was carving. Daryl tosses the supplies, the insulin, towards them, and tells them, “It’s all there. Good luck… you’re gonna need it.” As he starts to leave again, a truck comes barreling through the woods. Three men with guns get out, and one we will soon learn is named Wade shouts out, “Let’s end this!”

Forest Girl yells, “It’s ours! We earned what we took.”

Wade: “You’re gonna return what you took. You’re gonna pay for the gas it took to come out here, and for all the time these men took out. It’s over. You know the rules.”

Forest Girl: “Your rules are bats–t!”

Forest Guy: “We’re not going back, Wade! We’re done kneeling.”

Daryl, hiding behind a tree, sees the rest of Wade’s group spreading out to attack, and he tells Tina and her friends to follow him. The four hide behind some trees, and Daryl spots a walker trapped behind a rock. He rustles some branches to attract the attention of one of Wade’s men, Cam, who walks right towards the walker. Cam’s arm becomes Rock Walker’s lunch, and Wade comes running when Cam yells, begging him to chop his arm off to save him. Wade does, then tells the rest of his men via walkie-talkie that they’re leaving, because he “only wants to take this so far… he only wants ass that’s willing.”

With Wade and crew gone, Forest Girl gives sister Tina insulin, and Forest Guy tells Daryl they thought he was one of “them.” “We knock you over the head, tie you up, threaten to kill you… why the hell did you come back?”

Daryl: “Maybe I’m stupid, too.”

The four of them continue walking through the woods. Forest Guy tells Daryl they’d been at Wade’s camp since the beginning, but they still didn’t know everyone. “Back when we first threw in with them, it was as good a place as any.” He says. “Things got harder and people got harder, human nature kicked in, and it became a truly unique kind of s–tshow.” Adds Forest Girl, “People will trade anything for safety, knowing that they’re safe.”

Daryl tells them no one is safe anymore: “You can’t promise that, anyhow.”

Forest Guy: “You can promise the people that wanna hear it.”

Tina runs towards a greenhouse, which was melted in the fire that Forest Guy and Girl started. Inside, there are two bodies covered in melted glass, and Tina recognizes them. Forest Girl says she and Tina used to babysit Under Glass Walkers when they were young, and Tina places a small bouquet of wildflowers between the walkers. Her presence awakens them, and they break through the glass and chomp on her, dragging her down between them and dooming her to become one of them.

Forest Girl cries and apologizes to her dead sister, and while she and Forest Guy deal with their loss, Daryl tries to recruit them. He asks them THE three questions — for the record, Forest Guy has killed at least a couple dozen walkers and no humans — and tells them, “I’m from a place where people are still like they were, more or less, for better or worse.”

Daryl takes his new friends with him to retrieve his bike, telling them they’ll go find Sasha and Abe, who have a car and can drive them, presumably to Alexandria. Except that, as Daryl starts to push his bike onward, he hears a click and looks into the bike’s rearview mirror. Forest Guy pulls a gun on Daryl and demands his crossbow and the bike.

“You gonna go back? Gonna be safe? Ain’t nowhere safe no more,” Daryl says. “You gonna kneel?”

Forest Guy gets on the bike and starts it up, and Forest Girl joins him, tossing some bandages at Daryl. “I’m sorry,” she tells him.

“You’re gonna be,” Daryl says, and they drive off.

The Insurance Office

With their car out of commission and Daryl off on his own, Sasha tells Abe the best way to find a tracker, i.e. Daryl, is to sit tight and let him find you. She makes a deep footprint in some mud, and she and Abe walk into the nearest town, where she carves “DIXON” on the outside door of an insurance office and goes inside.

There’s a walker locked inside a conference room, but the office otherwise seems safe. Abraham does not; he’s been taking foolish chances for a while, which Sasha points out to him. He counters that she was once out of control herself, and she assures him she’s fine now, but that he is not, wanting to take the time to stab the guys in the car instead of assuming there was more danger nearby and fleeing, and wanting to kill a walker outside the insurance office, instead of going inside immediately.

“Loose ends make my ass itch,” he tells her. “If I have not gotten my psyche straight, it’s because the s–t’s continually been hitting the fan.” But she’s not buying it. She tells him he’s been playing chicken with his life, that now that he has a roof over his head at Alexandria, he has choices, and that has made him nervous and restless.

Abraham taunts a walker and finds some new weapons when he goes scavenging outside the insurance office — including a rocket launcher. And when he brings them back to show Sasha, she asks where he got them. “Fruit of some off-the-charts stupidity,” he owns up to.

“Self-awareness is a beautiful thing,” she says, with no idea what Abraham is about to lay on her.

“I like the way you call bulls–t, Sasha,” he says. “I believe I’d like to get to know you a whole lot better.”

Sasha: “What makes you think I want that?”

Abraham: “A man can tell.”

Sasha, laughing: “Well, you got some stuff to take care of.”

Abraham: “Yeah, I do.”

Keep on Truckin’

Without his bike or any weapons, Daryl goes back to the place in the woods where he saw the walker with the melted helmet. In the dirt, he spots and uncovers a buried sign for the Pattrick Fuel Company, and remembers the place Forest Guy led him to. Tracking his way back there, Daryl finds a truck and kills the walker in the driver’s seat.

At the insurance office, Sasha and Abraham hear a noise outside and run to the window, just in time to see Daryl pull up in the truck.

As the three ride back towards Alexandria — Abraham smiling and wearing a military uniform he found in the office — Daryl tries to connect with Rick or Glenn on the radio. At first, he gets no response. Then he hears a muffled voice, and asks for the person on the other end to repeat it.

“Help!” a male voice says.

Zombie Bites:

* We have not seen the last of Forest Guy and Forest Girl. Trust.

* What do we know about Wade and Cam and the other men who were hunting Daryl’s new frenemies in the burnt forest? They’re part of a group who lives in a community with very strict — as Forest Girl put it, “bats–t” — rules, a group which makes its members pay for every single thing they get. When Wade gives up the chase, saying ultimately “he” — presumably the leader of the community — only wants “ass that’s willing.” Does that mean that’s how Forest Girl paid for what her group took? And now that we know TWD comic-book big baddie Negan has been cast and is likely to show up in next year’s Season 6 finale, is Negan the “he” to whom Wade is referring? Which would make Wade and Cam members of the Saviors group of survivors?

One thing is clear: This is a fantastic time to catch up on The Walking Dead comic books if you haven’t read them.

* There are no characters in the Walking Dead comics who match up exactly to Tina, Forest Guy, and Forest Girl, but in the Telltale Games TWD game episode “Around Every Corner,” there is a woman named Molly who sleeps with a doctor to get insulin for her younger sister. She’s also from a survivor community that is said to have a huge population, and which is said to have a lot of very strict rules.

* After Wade chops Cam’s arm off, they’re retreating back to their truck when Wade tells Cam to “walk it off.” Funny line, but it also suggests Wade’s group is a pretty tough, or at least callous, bunch — two words that would definitely be accurate descriptions of the way Negan operates in the comics.

* That voice on Daryl’s radio at the end of the episode: We all want it to be Glenn, but as you can read in our postmortem interview with Norman Reedus, it definitely is not. Who could it be? Perhaps it’s someone who’s with Glenn at the dumpster? Someone who’s trying to help him? Someone who’s stolen his radio? Someone who’s a member of the same crew Wade and Cam belong to? Or maybe it’s Forest Guy?

* Steven Yeun’s name remains MIA in the opening credits, for what that’s worth.

OK, Dead-heads, let’s hear your reactions to “Always Accountable”: Who is that voice that asks for help at the end? How big of a scandal will the new Abraham-and-Sasha romance cause back in Alexandria? Will Daryl get his bike and crossbow back? What group do Wade and Cam represent? And do you think Glenn makes an appearance in next week’s episode?

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