Read the full episode summary of the season 4 episode 9 After here. Spoilers ahead!

Episode 9 starts with Michonne looking at the destroyed prison. She finds Hershel’s head, now re-animated as a walker, and she puts him to rest. Michonne then makes two new walker pets for herself, taking off their arms and lower jaws. Meanwhile Carl and an injured Rick are walking down a road with Rick falling behind and Carl not listening to him. They stop at a barbeque restaurant, get some food and kill a walker, then find shelter in an abandoned home. Carl and Rick have a few tense moments with each other where Carl is seemingly angry with Rick. Michonne sees footprints but decides not to follow them.

Michonne has a flashback/dream where she’s holding her son while her boyfriend Mike and his friend Terry talk. As the dream goes on, it goes from before the apocalypse to during the apocalypse and then she sees the two as her walker pets and her son gone, she starts screaming and then wakes up.

While Rick is sleeping/in a coma-like state, Carl leaves the house to lure two walkers away from it. He gets into a little trouble but manages to take out three walkers. Carl comes back to the house and talks to a still sleeping Rick, yelling at him and blaming him for failing to protect everyone and even says that he’d be fine if Rick died. Carl goes off to a nearby house to look for food. Again he gets into some walker trouble but manages to escape but loses one of his boots.

As Michonne walks with a group of walkers, she sees a walker that looks similar to her. She suddenly kills the walker and all of the other walkers around her including her new pets. She heads back, finds the footprints and goes in their direction.

At night Carl wakes up and hears Rick groaning, as if he is now a walker. Rick falls off the couch onto the floor and grabs at Carl. Carl aims his gun at Rick but is unable to shoot him. Carl hears his dad call his name and realizes he is not dead. Carl tells him that he’s scared.

The next day, Michonne finds the barbeque restaurant, and before leaving it, she sits down and talks to Mike. Michonne eventually finds the house that Rick and Carl are staying in and knocks on the door. Rick looks through the peephole and tells Carl that it’s for him.

In case some of the parts with Michonne confused you or left you with questions and you missed Talking Dead, Danai Gurira, who plays Michonne, talked with EW and answered some questions about some of those parts in episode 9.

Danai Gurira talks about the flashback dream that Michonne had in episode 9.

GURIRA: I looked up the interpretation of dreams and I had already decided what the dream meant and I looked it up and I was right. Her subconscious is forcing her to metabolize her grief and if you won’t do it when you’re awake then your subconscious might force you to do it when you’re asleep. The idea of remembering holding her son or having a loving moment with her man is not something that she’s willing to revisit in her consciousness, and she’s shut it completely down. So that’s why she keeps away from Judith. But the idea is there is too much trauma going on, so you have to process it or you might just die.
Source: EW (link above)

Danai Gurira talks about when Michonne was sitting down in the barbecue restaurant talking to Mike

GURIRA: I think that it’s what she goes on to do. Find the people she cares about. As long as people you care about still exist then you carry on for others. And there will always be others. She thought there was going to be nobody after the loss of her son and her man, but she finds a group of people that she deeply cares about. She finds the Carls, the Ricks, the Daryls, the Hershels. She finds a group of people who she can devote herself to again, which she’s good at. She takes care of business. She protects people well. When the rubber hits the road, she goes and takes care of the Governor before he can cause any more destruction. She knows it’s part of her DNA, it’s part of her strength, to take care of Andrea. She knows she does that well. The answer is: you keep taking care of people. You keep being a part of people of a community because if you don’t do that, if you isolate, then you start to die.
Source: EW (link above)

Danai Gurira talks about the part where she is walking with a group of walkers, notices a walker that looks similar to her and then she awakens and kills all of the walkers.

GURIRA: For me, that’s her fighting for her soul. That’s not going to be me and that could’ve been me. If I hadn’t been a fighter from the beginning, I could’ve been this woman, walking out with the dead with blood on her face, wearing the same clothes that she was wearing when the apocalypse hit. That part of her, that is a fighter, that is fierce, that was starting to harden and deaden and die because she was so sick of the pain and the trauma, that woman triggers it. She’s like, why am I walking around with a bunch of zombies. This is not who I am. This is about her fighting for herself, her fighting for her will. There is a part where she’s killed all of them at the end and it’s really emotional for her. She’s cracking, she’s open, she’s having this catharsis. She knows she has to carry on and fight. She doesn’t lay down and die. She’s not that person and she doesn’t want to become that person.
Source: EW (link above)

Scott Gimple talked with hollywoodreporter.com about episode 9 and the parts with Michonne.

This, in some ways, is completing a story from last season. Last season, we saw Michonne, with help from Daryl, Rick and Tyreese, figured out that she was running away. She was going off looking for The Governor even though she knew she wouldn’t find him. She was doing it to step away from people and to avoid getting close. The moment she decided to get close, that’s when all those people were torn away from her — not in the least Hershel. In this episode, we start her with that loss of Hershel and the prison and all the closeness she’d achieved. She took that as a message from the universe that, “I was right, you can’t get close to people; that’s how you get hurt. I lost Andrea and I lost all these people so forget it. I had right idea. Let me get some new walker pets and walk the earth alone because that’s how you stay safe emotionally.” She’s haunted by her dreams but more importantly, she finds that her plan leads her to become a dead person. She’s walking among the dead and basically dead inside and she can’t do it. She knows she can’t go back to being a dead persona and isolating herself. In this wonderful moment, she rejects death and she chooses life. It’s this very cathartic action moment and that’s one of my favorite things from the show — when you see action and emotion explode at same time and feed each other and have meaning.
Source: hollywoodreporter.com

A look towards episode 10: Inmates
Scott Gimple also said in a hollywoodreporter.com article (link above) that next week’s episode answers a few major questions. Could one of those questions be, what happened to baby Judith? We’ll have to wait and see.