The Walking Dead: Top 100 Moments

84. Hershel Tells Lizzie To Go Read ‘Tom Sawyer’

Episode 405 “Internment”

Original Airdate: 11/10/2013

Submitted By: Sonya Iryna

In the grand arc of the show this was a relatively small moment. But it’s a significant one because it says so much about Hershel’s character as a man and as a father. Throughout the show Beth and Maggie repeatedly made reference to Hershel telling them that “we all have jobs to do”.

It’s clear that he used that trick to keep the girls calm in situations of crisis. Hershel was unflappable in a crisis and he taught his girls to be as well by keeping them focused on their “jobs” when a crisis came up.

So when Lizzie was put in the sick ward because she had the flu that was sweeping through the prison and she was alone in the cell block surrounded by the dead and the dying Hershel didn’t want her to get scared by what was going on all around her.

As he was quietly taking the dead away to be put down where the others couldn’t see he gave Lizzie the copy of Tom Sawyer that Carol had been reading to the kids. He told her to back to her cell and read. That was her “job”.

When she came to him upset and wanting to help with taking care of the sick he told her that her job was to read a certain number of pages of Tom Sawyer and that she should go back to her cell and do that. And he told her that “we all have jobs to do. That one’s yours.”

It was a moment of calm before the storm that occurred in “Internment”.