The Walking Dead Recap With Spoilers: "On the Inside"

Unsafe

Connie and Virgil race through dark woods. He wants to hole up inside a house but Connie wants to keep running. They head inside a long-abandoned house surrounded by walkers. Virgil almost gets bit throwing himself between biters and Connie. The dead traps them inside.

At Alexandria, Carol devises a plan to set out and find Connie after being tipped off by Whisperer Keith (Brad Fleischer) at Hilltop. Magna reports Kelly is gone. On the road, Kelly rides a horse in search of her sister.

It's daylight when Connie inspects the house covered in cobwebs and dust. She pulls out a piece of notepad paper with a handwritten map of where she's been. Virgil searches the upstairs, knife in hand, finding nothing. He tries to sign to Connie: "I checked the whole house. We're okay. Nobody's here."

He writes out on a notepad telling Connie to rest. She hasn't slept in days and he'll keep watch. "We will find your home." Connie writes back: "Unsafe." Connie peeks outside through boarded-up windows. She has flashes of the cave-in and other horrors from Alpha's cave teeming with walkers. She writes another note to Virgil and heads off to check the house again.

Off the 283

At Meridian, Carver tortures Frost (Glenn Stanton) of the Wardens and peels off his fingernails. He wants to know where Maggie and her people are hiding. Pope orders Daryl to take a turn. Daryl leans into the role of heel. A beaten and bloodied Frost is in on it. Daryl chokes him out, makes it look real. "Just give 'em a location where your friends are hiding. You do that, this all goes away."

Frost tells them to all go eat shit. Carver wants to carve him up. Leah hands Daryl a knife. Frost signals to Daryl: Carver's got a gun. They need to play this just right. Daryl grips Frost's finger. "No one needs to die in here. So just say a location so we can all walk away happy."

Before Frost can get out the rest of his insulting quip, Daryl severs his finger. "Location! Or I take another!" Finally, Frost folds. "Yellow house. Town off the 283," he whimpers. "Antenna. Antenna. Antenna…"

A proud Pope looks on. He commands Leah to take Carver and Daryl and scope it out.

Not Alone

At the house, floors creak as Connie creeps through a hall of locked doors. The hallway is decorated with defaced, decades-old portraits of people with scratched-out eyes. She opens a bathroom medicine cabinet when she sees it: something stirring in a slot for discarded razor blades. Connie leans in and jumps back at the sight of blood-red and yellow stained eyes. Something inhuman.

Connie scrambles back to Virgil and signs to him: "We're not alone. Something else is in here with us." Whatever it was, it was behind the wall staring back at her. She communicates more directly, taking Virgil's knife and carving out her message into an old painting: "NOT ALONE."

At Arbor Hills, Carver leads a squad of Reapers in search of Maggie. They close in on a yellow house. Daryl sends a subtle signal to Maggie, watching the street from inside a green house next door. The Reapers burst into the yellow house and clear it. A wild goose chase.

Hungry

Kelly tracks Connie. She finds remnants of a camp left in a hurry. It's Connie's. Her notepad documents what happened: "TRAPPED WITH DEAD. WALKED WITH THEM FOR DAYS. NO LIGHT. NO FOOD. LITTLE WATER."

Another page with Connie's handwriting and someone else's. It's written correspondence between Connie and Virgil:

"Michonne told me"
"WHERE IS SHE?"
"don't know she left to look for someone — was hoping to see her"

Another page.

"IT FEELS LIKE WE ARE BEING WATCHED."
"It's late. We'll pack up at first light"

Kelly sobs. "Where are you?"

In the bathroom, Virgil taps the walls and peers in. He doesn't see anything. Connie is freaked. She's sleep-deprived, Virgil says, maybe she only thinks she saw something… in the hall, Virgil follows Connie when he's cut off by a sliding door. He screams her name, but Connie can't hear him. She's left alone in her utter silence.

Connie tries not to panic. She presses her back to the wall and slinks forward. Her hands feel the vibrations of soft rumblings. Something's coming.

A hunched-over creature crawls behind her, giving chase with pounding footsteps as Connie runs for safety. The grunting and growling ghoul slobbers after her, thumping towards the door Connie slams closed behind her.

Connie can't hear it, but the creature howls: "Hungry! Hungry!"

With Us or You're Not

Leah, Carver, and Daryl burst into another house. They find evidence people were just here. Daryl sees the corner of a hatch, just barely exposed by a rug. Below his feet, Maggie watches from beneath a crack in the floor. Daryl moves the rug with his boot. If they went out the back, Daryl lies, he can track them.

Under the floorboards, Maggie, Elijah (Okea Eme-Akwari), Father Gabriel (Seth Gilliam), and Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) huddle in wait. Carver causes a problem and squabbles with Daryl about moving on too quickly. Leah tells him to sift upstairs and make sure they didn't miss anything. Left alone with Daryl, Leah tells him, "You're either with us, or you're not."

Kelly's search for Connie continues. Carol, Magna, and Rosita find her. "I'm fine," she says. "But Connie's not." Kelly reports her sister is with some guy who knew Michonne. "They left in a hurry. Something's not right."

"She's out there. She's scared. She needs me." They're going to find her. Together.

Flesh From Bones

At the house, Connie presses against the door, desperately trying to keep whatever that thing is out. The thumping and grunting stop. She's again left alone in the quiet. In the basement, Connie steps over crunching human bones. Leftovers from someone — or something's — meal. Skulls, ribcages, and other licked-clean bones litter the ground. Falling dust as the room rumbles. They found her.

Connie climbs into a vent to get away. It's piss-your-pants scary as she stumbles through a dark hall, tormented by visions of the undead. She finds herself behind the wall, peeping out into the bathroom where she first saw it.

Virgil is hounded by the creeper crawlers. Connie spots Virgil and pounds at the wall. A trembling Virgil unsheathes his knife and approaches with caution. Connie beats at the wall with a pulse, hoping to alert Virgil that it's her and not whatever is after them.

Connie sees a feral person slither out of the darkness. The creature creeps on an unsuspecting Virgil. Her pounding gets more desperate. She can do nothing but scrape at the wall as the long-haired man, covered in blood and guck and grime, pounces on Virgil.

The feral creature savagely attacks Virgil and strangles him. "Hungry," he snarls, choking Virgil out. Connie's thumping is enough of a distraction for Virgil to grip his knife and stab his attacker in the gut. It slinks away like a wounded animal.

Toldja

At the hideout, Carver comes up with nothing. Daryl tips off Maggie again, telling the Reaper, "You got, what? 20 people in your town. You got weapons. You got walls. You'd see them coming from a mile away. Trust me, they ran." Leah says it's time to move on. Daryl doesn't have to try too hard to goad Carver into a fight.

"Everything's a test now," Carver tells Leah about Daryl's baptism by fire in Episode 4. "If you think this guy is ever gonna give a shit about any of us, you're gonna fail."

"He's right. I don't give a shit about any of you. Except you," Daryl says to Leah. "I'm here for you. It's no secret. I made mistakes. But I'm here right now. Maybe I'd be better at it this time, if you'd let me. And Pope scares the shit outta me. I don't wanna be face-first in the fire under his boot. But if you say trust him, I'll trust him."

They're about to move out when Carver spots it: the hiding spot under the rug. Gun in hand, he opens the hatch... and it's empty. Outside, Maggie's group sneaks away. "Toldja."

Together

Night falls. Kelly leads the way. Her intuition tells her that her sister went that way.

Back in the house, Connie and Virgil huddle together. "They led us here. I've never seen people this far gone," says Virgil. "To herd us, like prey. But we're not. I'm getting you out. We'll make a run for it."

He gets her attention, looking right at her. Hands her his knife. "No matter what happens… you have to keep going. With or without me. Don't stop."

Connie shakes her head. He tries to convince her. She refuses. With her hands, Connie tells him, "If we're going to get out, we leave together. I'm not letting you give up now."

He doesn't know how to explain. "I don't have a choice. I lost myself… for a long time. Off the map. And I made choices that I can't un-choose. But she gave me another chance. Michonne. She pointed me back to the road, and somehow that road led right to you. So I have to pass on that chance, or it all means nothing. And if you can… if you can find your family…"

She signs again. We leave together. He wants her to promise to keep going, no matter what. Connie shapes their hands into fists and presses them together. Together.

He understands. "Together."

Get Out

Outside the room, the sounds of guttural screams. The roars of feral creatures ready to feed. Virgil covers Connie as they hurry through dark halls in search of a way out. It's one locked door after another. Claustrophobic corridors are crawling with more ferals scurrying on all fours. They make it into the living room when a feral woman pounces on Virgil, tackling him to the ground.

She stabs him in the back. Again. Again. Connie slashes at her and the feral woman retreats. Virgil tells Connie to get out, but she's not leaving him behind. She drags him into the corner. More growling ferals crawl down the stairs. They're surrounded.

Connie's hands tear into a walker corpse. She slathers herself in gore and guts and gets Virgil behind her. She rips open the door, letting in the flood of walkers waiting outside. The zombie horde descends on the ferals as Virgil and Connie make their escape.

Everything I Needed

Outside, two snarling ferals close in on Connie. Kelly stops them, firing from her slingshot. The sisters reunite. They're back together.

"I'm sorry," signs a sobbing Kelly. They tearfully embrace.

At Meridian, the trio returns empty-handed. Pope laughs. "This day was a success. After you left, I continued the 'discussion' with our guest. He wasn't too talkative. But I got everything I needed out of him."

Pope stares down Daryl. A zombified Frost is tied to a tree. Pope whispers to Carver and laughs, leaving Leah and Daryl to wonder what it means.

End of episode.

Follow the author @CameronBonomolo on Twitter for all things TWD. The Walking Dead Season 11 airs Sundays at 9/8c on AMC.