Season 4 Episode 14 - "The Grove" [AMC] [SPOILERS]

Melissa McBride deserves a lot of credit (Chad Coleman too I guess) because she basically carried that episode. This was Carol's story really: I always figured the two girls had become her surrogate daughters and you could see how a lot of the guilt and grief over losing Sophie had evolved into protecting Lizzie and Mika, she seemed utterly determined that they would learn & survive. To then find herself losing another set of children, this time in even more gut-wrenching circumstances, that required the actor to really sell the emotion of it all & McBride definitely delivered.

The pace of the first half didn't annoy me as much as others, because you could see they were building to something with Lizzie; they had kept her obvious psychosis in the background for much of her last few appearances (bar the horrible Judith suffocation scene) & given how it suddenly became the focus of this episode I suspected things were afoot.

I wasn't wrong. God-damn that was all very grim, arguably the darkest the show has been since day 1. It's all very well playing with the notions of how civilised adults might abandon their humanity in the face of oblivion, but it's quite another thing to show how a child's mind could become so warped when surrounded by these new concepts of normality. More than most episodes you'd legitimately ask the question of why it's worth carrying on when even the innocent have become corrupted. I suspect Carol, when she confessed to Tyresse about murdering the infected back in the prison, was hoping he'd pull the trigger; that Tyresse chose to forgive her was a small chink of light in an otherwise pitch-black story.

My only quibble was they really, really oversold the relative innocence of Mika; the hunting scene was particularly poor & just felt like an overly blunt, unsubtle way of underlining the horror of Lizzie's eventual actions.

Criticising child actors feels a bit redundant though, particularly younger ones who have yet to even hit their teens; often they simply don't have the emotional range to project in the way you'd expect an adult - or even teenage - actor. I think we should cut them some slack, they did ok considering what was asked of them.