"Always Accountable" is the sixth episode of the sixth season of AMC's The Walking Dead. It is the seventy-third episode of the series overall. It premiered on November 15, 2015 at 9/8c on AMC, and on November 16, 2015 at 9pm on Fox. It was written by Heather Bellson and directed by Jeffrey January.
Plot
Getting back to Alexandria proves hard.
Synopsis
Daryl, Sasha and Abraham arrive at the 20-mile marker set for leading the herd away from Alexandria. As they pull away from the herd and begin the journey back to Alexandria, a group of gun-wielding assailants ambushes them in cars. As they flee, Daryl crashes on his bike and is separated from Sasha and Abraham.
Sasha and Abraham crash their car and emerge from the wreckage with guns blazing. They defeat their attackers but flee when they hear reinforcements arriving.
Daryl eludes his attackers and quietly walks his motorcycle through a burnt-out forest littered with charred walker bodies. He tries to radio Sasha and Abraham but gets no response. As he inspects a wound on his arm, he hears a noise nearby. He hides his bike under a pile of branches and finds two sisters, Tina and Sherry, with their hands up, telling him they took what they deserved. Just then, a man knocks him out from behind.
As Daryl drifts in and out of consciousness, he sees his captors rummage through his supplies and put his crossbow in a bag. The man pegs Daryl as a soldier from an outpost – one of the men who originally attacked Daryl, Sasha and Abraham.
The man, who refers himself as "D", wakes Daryl at gunpoint the next morning. Daryl insists he isn't who they think he is, but D doesn't believe him.
Daryl's captors march him through the woods. D declares that they are not returning to the community they came from. "You feel you gotta kneel? Fair enough. We don't." D tells Daryl.
As they keep moving, D lays out a plan to find "Patty" and then leave immediately. He describes how he and Sherry burned the entire forest with the walkers in it. He then explains that they joined up with a community, thinking naively that they would rebuild society together. Daryl argues that they should let him go, but D refuses to listen, and holds him at gunpoint when Daryl suggests that they're making a mistake. D angrily questions if Daryl posses an immediate threat and demands to be told whether he should be killed. Daryl says no.
They arrive at a gated parking lot full of walkers and start to panic. "Patty", D says. "She's gone." Tina faints, and as they tend to her, Daryl grabs their duffel bag and runs back into the woods, evading gunfire from D.
Safe in the woods, Daryl again tries to radio Sasha and Abraham without luck. He fumbles for his crossbow from the duffel to shoot a nearby walker. Afterwards, he looks down at the fallen contents of the duffel and sees a cooler filled with insulin, realizing that Tina would need it for her diabetes.
Meanwhile, Sasha and Abraham deduce that their attackers had intended to ambush someone else. Sasha insists that Daryl will try to regroup with them and that the best way to find a tracker like Daryl is to let him find you.
In a nearby town, Sasha writes "Dixon" on the door of an office building. Abraham eagerly takes out his knife to slay a walker down the block but Sasha warns him against leaving evidence for the attackers to trace their whereabouts. Inside the building, Sasha situates herself in an office as a walker pounds on the glass wall of an adjacent conference room. She asks Abraham if he wants to stand watch, or sleep. Abraham opts to stand watch.
Abraham later tells Sasha that he's eager to kill the walker in the conference room. Sasha calls him out for being reckless. "You have choices," Sasha says. "And without walkers, and bullets, and shit hittin' the fan, you're accountable for them." Abraham shrugs her off and insists on standing watch throughout the night.
Back in the woods, Daryl returns Tina's insulin and forces D to hand over their gun as well as a wooden figurine that D carved. They're interrupted by the arrival of men in a truck. Wade, the leader, orders D to return what he took – Tina and Sherry, who angrily reply that they're not going back. In response, the truck begins to plow through the forest, trying to flush them out. Daryl helps them find a hiding place further away, and gives their gun back to D. He lures one of Wade's men into the path of a walker, which bites him. Wade hacks off the man's arm and calls off the search. Referring to their unidentified leader, "He only wanted to take this so far", Wade tells his men. "He only wants ass that's willing."
The next morning, Abraham finds an abandoned military vehicle containing RPGs and a box of cigars. He spots a walker impaled on a bridge fence and eyes the RPG launcher strapped to its back. He climbs onto the fence to get the launcher, dangling precariously over the edge and grappling face-to-face with the walker, unknowingly tearing his clothes. The walker snaps at him and Abraham finally backs off. He yells in frustration and returns to the Humvee to smoke a cigar.
As Abraham sits, he watches the impaled walker's rotted shoulder slide completely through the fence post. The walker falls to the ground, leaving behind the launcher, dangling by its strap. Abraham brings the RPG back to the office and admits to Sasha that she was right about his recklessness. He commends her for calling him on his bullshit and declares he would like to get to know her better.
"What makes you think I want that?" Sasha asks..
"A man can tell", Abraham replies. Sasha smiles, but tells him he has "some stuff to take care of first", and Abraham agrees.
Daryl's group comes across a burnt and melted greenhouse. Tina recognizes the two dead people encased in melted glass inside and lays flowers at their side. The corpses awaken and attack Tina, breaking through the glass and killing her. Daryl kills the walkers as Sherry breaks down and D looks on distraught.
Daryl and D dig a grave for Tina. Daryl asks him how many walkers he's killed, how many people, and why. Satisfied with D's answers, Daryl invites them to come live in Alexandria, and D acknowledges his offer, seemingly interested.
Daryl brings D and Sherry to his motorcycle, and explains that he doesn't know where Abraham and Sasha are, but that he's going to find them. D looks at Sherry, and then turns his gun on Daryl, forcing him to hand over the crossbow. D and Sherry get on the bike. Sherry proceeds to throw some medical packs to Daryl, and they drive off, not seen for the rest of the episode.
Daryl finds a fuel truck in the woods branded "A.A. Pattrick Fuel Co." Its license plate reads "Patty". He kills the walker in the cab and drives to pick up Abraham and Sasha.
Daryl, Sasha and Abraham drive down the road in the fuel truck. Daryl tries to radio Rick. "Help", a muffled voice on the radio replies.
Other Cast
Co-Stars
- Darin Cooper as Wade
- Matt Lowe as Cam
- Liz E. Morgan as Tina
Uncredited
Deaths
- Tina
- Carla (Alive, Confirmed Fate; Zombified)
- Delly (Alive, Confirmed Fate; Zombified)
- 2 unnamed Saviors
Trivia
- First appearance of Dwight.
- First appearance of Sherry.
- First appearance of The Saviors.
- First (and last) appearance of Tina.
- First (and last) appearance of Wade.
- First (and last) appearance of Cam.
- First (and last) appearance of Carla. (Zombified)
- First (and last) appearance of Delly. (Zombified)
- Dwight and Sherry, are credited as D and Honey. This was probably to mislead the fans.
- AMC accidentally uploaded the promo for episode 6 on their website and on their YouTube channel instead of episode 5. AMC took the video down when they noticed their mistake.
- The walker that Daryl kills in the woods after escaping contains a Cherokee rose on its body. This is an Easter egg to both Daryl and Carol from Season 2's fourth episode, "Cherokee Rose"
- This episode's title comes from Sasha's speech to Abraham about being "always accountable" for his own actions.
- The line "Self-awareness is a beautiful thing" said by Sasha to Abraham in this episode are the same words Bob told Sasha in "Alone".
- Daryl asks Dwight the same questions that we saw previously several times, starting with "30 Days Without An Accident", but also in "Indifference," "Alone", "Strangers", "The Distance" and here in "Always Accountable". The rationale behind the questions has never been revealed on-camera in the TV series itself, but it would appear that they were chosen as a quick way of gauging the attitude of survivors. There seem to be no true "right" or "wrong" answers as such. Most of the actual gauging comes from peripherical signals, such as how promptly the answers are given, with which attitude, and how much sense they make when taken together.
- The van that Daryl found at the end of the episode had the license plate named "Patty", this can be a reference to what Dwight's group wanted to find Patty.
- Daryl can be seen with Beth's old knife during the entire episode.
- This is the first episode since its introduction that the Alexandria Safe-Zone does not appear.
- It is revealed in "Start to Finish" that the person who said "help" at the end of this episode was Eugene.
References