The Good:
7. The Performances
"The Grove" will go down as one of the best episodes of The Walking Dead in the first four seasons of the show. In fact, even if the action had been lacklustre and the plot laughable, the performances of the four (non-baby) actors would have still elevated it to well above average. Kyla Kenedy was given the chance to be more than just an adorable ray of sunshine, and we were able to see a streak of self-awareness and maturity peeking out from underneath all of the sweetness as Mika tried to care for her unwell older sister. Chad L. Coleman as Tyreese had the unenviable position of playing the most utterly uninformed of all four of them. Even Judith was more in the know than poor Tyreese. Everybody had secrets except for him, and it was impossible to watch him fall in love with the possibility of this makeshift family that he knew nothing about without feeling bad for him. His transformation from naiveté of their non-zombie situation to agreeing to the execution of a child was brutal, and the weight of their decision to kill Lizzie visibly weighs on him at the close of the episode. For her part, Brighton Sharbino was remarkable. Lizzie's overall demeanour and her near-smothering of Judith had left many viewers crying out for her blood prior to "The Grove"; seeing her stand over her little sister's corpse and smiling with the bloody knife in her hand probably ought to have been the breaking point to send her over into true villainy. Instead, Brighton's performance was so layered that we could see that there was no malevolence in Lizzie's behaviour. She truly did not understand the blurred lines between life and death in the Walking Dead universe, and the absolute tragedy of her death cannot be overstated. Finally, there was Melissa McBride, who made up for her long absence by turning in a stellar performance as Carol that will hopefully earn her some awards recognition. The combination of guilt, paralysing fear, and determination for them all to survive at any cost left her off-balance, and the way in which everything fell apart despite all that she had done and given of herself takes her from pragmatic at the beginning to arguably suicidal by end.
