The Walking Dead: 10 best episodes by new showrunner Angela Kang

3. “Four Walls And A Roof” ( Co-writer with Corey Reed)

Season 5, episode 3

“Four Walls And A Roof” is another exceptionally dark episode, even for The Walking Dead. It contains a scene directly from the comic and it brings the Terminus storyline to a bloody close. Bob, who was kidnapped by the Terminus people, awakens to find his leg has been cut off and the Terminus survivors are eating it. He laughs hysterically as Gareth gives him a speech intended to heighten his fear and highlight the horror of the Terminus secret – that they are cannibals. After Gareth asks him why he’s laughing Bob reveals that he had been bitten earlier, so the Terminus survivors are eating “tainted meat”.

Later in the episode, Bob is returned to the church where Rick and the others are holed up with Father Gabriel. They still don’t trust Father Gabriel at this point, which was a good thing. Bob reveals what has happened to him and the survivors start to stay their goodbyes to him. Rick and the other fighters in the group go out to track down Gareth. But Gareth and the other Terminus survivors attack the church after Rick has left.

It’s a trap though. Rick and the others return to the church and slaughter the Terminus survivors in particularly bloody fight scenes. Rick goes into full Savage Rick mode and kills Gareth with a lot of gore using the red machete.

When Gabriel protests the bloody murders inside his church, proclaiming that it’s the house of God Maggie tells him that it isn’t the house of God. She tells him it’s just “four walls and a roof”.

That statement is a great metaphor for a lot of things in the post-apocalypse world that used to be considered sacred but now are just things. And this episode, like several others, that Angela Kang wrote or co-wrote, proved that the writers could deftly walk the line of darkness and hope when telling the stories of the beloved Walking Dead characters.