The Walking Dead: Seven Cool Things You Might Have Missed in "Us"

This week's episode of AMC's The Walking Dead has been the subject of a ton of conversation... ...and even more speculation about next week's season finale. Robert Kirkman and Scott Gimple had promised fans a more hopeful ending than we're used to, which was interesting. In each of the first two seasons, Rick and his group of survivors lost their "home base" at the end of the season and at the end of season three, The Governor wiped out all of his people and the prison group had to bring them all on board. While the decision to bring the Woodbury residents into the prison ultimately proved tragic when The Governor came back this year at midseason, it seemed like an awfully hopeful ending at the time. Perhaps that's why, as the last couple of weeks have unfolded, the producers have backed away from "hopeful" a bit and promised a monster cliffhanger with major emotional impact on the characters.

The paintings We've talked about this before, but it seems as though the paintings that Carl and Michonne found while out scouting in "Claimed"  are significant to the overall plot. Most of the speculation has revolved around a self-portrait painted by the woman who lived in the house. We see her in the same overalls and with the same long lock of hair, as a dessicated corpse sitting in her rocker after having mercy-killed her family and then herself. Nevertheless, the smears of blood or blood-colored paint on the painting and some basic, physical characteristics shared with Lizzie led some fans to speculate about her connection to the painting. After she passed away and the first survivors made it to Terminus, they met Mary, who also looks oddly similar to the woman in the photograph. While Lizzie had a weird relationship with bunnies (one of the paintings in the hallway), Mary is cultivating sunflowers at Terminus (another painting). A light-colored dog like the one that came to visit Beth and Daryl, ultimately endangering them, is featured in another. It's easy to say "Oh, that's _____," but the reality is the paintings seem to be a metaphorical roadmap to the season's terrible journey.

Recap for the uninitiated Joe goes to the trouble of recapping "Claimed" from his perspective, as well; the penultimate episode of the season really felt like a fairly direct sequel to the one that we said seemed like a slasher flick, with Rick hiding out under the bed from boogeymen. He tells it all to Daryl, by way of trying to gain his trust. A man, he says, killed one of their members and left him to turn, endangering the rest of the group, when they wer eminding their own business and didn't even know he was there. From their perspective, that's true. From Rick's, they were a loud, violent group that was talking about raping women and strangling each other over sleeping arrangements. Killing one (incidentally, not as part of a plan) on the way out of the building wasn't really an undefensible act of malice -- but then again, one would assume Daryl is smart enough to know that there's some shade of gray in Joe's version of events. Familiar locations Throughout the second half of the season, there's been a fair amount of crossover. It looks now as though the camp where Daryl's group is sleeping is the same one where Bob, Sasha and Maggie were, when Maggie left them with a note in the dirt that she had left to give them more freedom. They took off after her, of course, just as the Claimers take off after their missing member here.

Bub Bub, the zombie they were trying to domesticate in Day of the Dead, appeared in the railroad tunnel. In fact, that whole bit in the tunnel was pretty reminiscent of the George Romero classic ... which was one of the first films ever worked on by Emmy-winning special effects guru Greg Nicotero, who directed this week's episode. "Look at the walkers, Glenn." Just as Maggie did when she emptied out the prison bus, Glenn looks at each of the walkers in the face before he kills them, making sure that none of them are his wife. It's a perfectly sensible thing to do...and one that's really only notable because each of them made sure to announce it to their traveling companions so that the audience knew it was important. There have been a ton of callbacks and references in the second half of the season, so any repeating pattern is hard to see as random. For instance...

"Let Momma Be" The note left on the windscreen of the minivan that Abraham, Eugene and Rosita take is too little, too late for the soccer mom zombie who's killed in order to get the vehicle. It's hard not to picture such a note coming from a child like Lizzie -- someone who has a hard time understanding the difference between the living and the undead.

"Liar!" "No!" When Eugene manipulates his way back toward Terminus instead of directing Rosita to Washington, D.C., she exclaims "Liar!" He responds, "No!" He proceeds to explain away his deception and defensively demand an apology for her accusation. Fans who read the comic books know that he was, at least in that version of the story, a liar and that there is nothing to be gained in Washington. That, many fans think, is why he fired on his own truck, smirked about it, and then has been so keen to follow Glenn and Tara for days; he gets to continue enjoying the protection of Abraham and Rosita without actually having to prove his worth.