The Walking Dead: Five Questions The Finale Must Answer

Since the fall of the prison, this season on AMC's The Walking Dead has been full of mystery and intrigue -- as well as just some plain, old-fashioned confusion. With less than an hour left to go before the season finale airs on the East Coast of the United States and spoilers start to flood social media, there are some things that pretty much every fan wants to see, or have answered, in tonight's episode, which is intriguingly titled "A." What are the "If you _________, we will riot!" story beats for tonight? Read on...

Will Rick and Judith be reunited? Ever since the fall of the prison, Rick and Carl Grimes have believed that Judith -- Rick's one-year-old daughter and Carl's baby sister -- died in the siege on their former home. Unbeknownst to them, the baby was saved by Tyreese, who

What happened to Beth? Shortly before Daryl joined up with Joe and the other members of his gang, he and Beth were traveling together when they wandered into a house that, in hindsight, seems like a pretty obvious trap. A well-stocked building with supplies and a booby-trapped field not far away was an enticing place to hole up for a day or more...until a stream of walkers found their way directly in the door and the pair became separated. The last Daryl (or any of the viewers) saw of Beth, she had apparently been taken away in a mysterious car. Since then, we've had no inkling who might have been driving the car or what business they have with Beth. One of the early popular theories was that it was The Hunters, but it seems that now most fans think The Hunters will be the people living in Terminus, and Beth's captor will likely be someone else entirely. Could it turn out to be someone...not so bad?! Yeah, we doubt it, too.

What is Terminus? This one is bound to be answered, probably fairly quickly. Most fans assume that Terminus is pretty terrible, in no small part because that's what creator Robert Kirkman said he would put his money on if he were a betting man. Of course, just about every new development in The Walking Dead is a big, glowing sign that says "things are gonna get worse," so even if Kirkman hadn't said that, it wouldn't be much of a stretch to expect that the place where "those who arrive, survive" is a giant trap. But...what kind of trap? If you hoped to kill people, for instance, why bring them to you instead of hunting them in the woods like The Hunters do in the comics? It seems like bringing them to where you live gives up some of your major strategic advantages if your victims turn out to be surprisingly capable.

Will the group really split up again? In last week's episode, "Us," there was a tease that Abraham, Rosita, Eugene, Sasha and Bob Stookey might head to Washington, D.C. to pursue Eugene's purported cure. Tara planned to go with them, which would have left Glenn and Maggie alone at Terminus. Is there something to the fact that of the characters listed above, only Glenn and Maggie have character posters for the finale? What is the fate of Daryl and his group? Joe and his group are brutal, dangerous people -- and they're not even all that clever about it. They aren't The Governor; they aren't Rick. They have what it takes to stay alive in the world of The Walking Dead, provided they basically stay put, hold their ground and remain on the defense. That's not what they're doing, though; they're actually actively seeking out Rick, and Terminus, and larger groups. Whatever befalls them -- be it at the hands of Rick or anybody else -- could be bad for Daryl if he doesn't play his cards just right... Bonus Question: What the heck has been happening? There's a timeline that you can find on Reddit that a fan has put together, hoping to make sense of the crazy, disjointed timeline that has resulted from our survivors being separated for the second half of Season Four. It would be nice to get a sense for who arrives at Terminus when, and what they were doing at what point. It's hardly essential, but it would be cool to know whether the fans have got things like "that fire Carol and Tyreese saw was Daryl and Beth's moonshine shack" right or mostly right. Of course, if we find out, it may well be because the first people to arrive at Terminus were very, very screwed when they got there.