The Walking Dead Review: “Self Help” (Season 5, Episode 5)

That brings us to Eugene, whose bull crap explanation of his cure – Remember: “Fight fire with fire” – has made his legitimacy a source of uncertainty since the season began. There’s also the small matter of his complete and utter indifference to moving forward with Abraham, and his desire to stay at the church with the others. If Eugene knows his stuff, and his cure is a sure thing, why not press on and be part of the solution? The others pressed Eugene for more details on his plan this week, which he more or less shrugged off by talking about missiles and how they’ll need to recalculate to account for different weather patterns in a world without the constant exhaust of cars, boats, planes and trains. Again, even if you’re not a scientist, how does this not sound moronic? Instead though, everyone’s fixated on Eugene’s mullet, which is, perhaps, another sign that he ain’t no scientist. What kind of scientist has a mullet? I’m sure there may be a be few, but at the Human Genome Project?

Pleasantly, one member of the group didn’t seem too sure about Eugene. Tara tries to buck up Eugene’s courage with pep talks and gratitude for the one time he showed initiative and attacked a walker to save her. Granted, he stabbed the walker in the shoulder blade, but he was proactive with a knife, which was a huge shift for the better. Eugene says that he knows he’s only kept around because he’s the man who can save the world, and if that weren’t the case, he’d be out on his own, and he knows he can’t survive on his own. Tara makes the case for humanity, and that Eugene, as a human being, has value outside, or in spite of, having the cure to the zombie plague. That assumption will be put to the test in the weeks to come because of the revelation at episode’s end.

In a fit of panic when Abraham insists on making a go through a zombie horde, Eugene admits that he’s nothing more than a con artist. He’s smarter than most people and a good liar, so when he came across Abraham he knew what buttons to push. Everyone looks crushed, except for Tara, who seemed like she was suspecting this was coming, especially after Eugene confessed to sabotaging the bus. Abraham, meanwhile, is devastated. The life he took back after the death of his family has been for naught, his faith placed in a man that used him and others that weren’t lucky enough to make it this far. Eugene shows that he’s not unaware of what his selfishness cost, rattling off a list of names of people who died between Houston and where they are now, including Bob. But once the news settles in, what fate awaits Eugene? Do they observe Tara’s universal view that all human life in this world of the dead has purpose, or will they all line-up to get their pound of payback from the man in the mullet?

Of course, with Eugene being about as useful to curing a plague as a bottle of anacin, the question is what direction the show will take from here. It was inevitable that the road to Washington and a cure would go nowhere because The Walking Dead isn’t about a set goal like getting off the island, or finding Earth, it’s about finding your place and your true self in a new reality. Abraham and Eugene are both about to have a very rude awakening into that reality. Until now they were content to overlook the obvious signs because of a shared a destination. Eugene’s belief that Washington was as good a place to go as any, supposing that the capital of the United States would be especially more secure than anywhere else, even in a zombie plague, seems like wishful thinking. So that leaves the group with an impossible question: where do they go, and what do they do now?

In the short term, may we assume that the mass of zombie’s bearing down on Abraham and the others will soon be bearing down on the entire group? We know that Daryl eventually makes it back to the church, presumably with Beth and Carol, but will everyone reunite once again in time to face the biggest battle against an undead force the series has ever mounted? There’s no point in showing an army of zombies you can smell coming from miles away without coming back to it later in the season (Chekhov’s zombie army?) and nothing forces you to put aside personal differences faster than the physical fight for survival. Also, nothing allows a coward to make amends faster than dying in glorious battle to protect his comrades. We know Gabriel has a lot to make up for, and now so does Eugene. To paraphrase from another franchise about survival, the odds are not in their favor.