1) Yes, I’m still talking about The Walking Dead, and yes, this is three posts in a row. Shut up.

2) SPOILERS, GODDAMMIT.  Go away right now.

3) Seriously.

4) Last chance, goddammit.  Even if you read as fast as I do you’ve had a chance to tear your eyes away by now.

5) Okay, one more thing:  I can’t take full credit for this; the wife and I put a lot of the details together in twenty minutes of exhaustive frame-by-frame last night and there’s also that .gif floating around of Tyreese running.  But:

6) Tyreese has Judith, and I can prove it.  Or at least I can come as close to proving it as one can reasonably be expected to do given that I don’t write the show.

All of the images ought to be clickable to make them bigger, but they’re not terribly high quality because I took them from my computer monitor with my phone; I can probably find a way to take screenshots from iTunes video but didn’t want this blog post to take a week.

This is the only shot of Judith we actually get in the episode.  Note one really important detail:  she’s buckled into her car seat.  She’s also way too big for it, but we’ll let that slide on account of zombie apocalypse.

This is Tyreese.   Just note the clothing and the gun:

This, a minute or two later, is also Tyreese.  I’ll recommend blowing this one up; note the following details:  1) He’s running toward the orange truck; a moment later the walkway above him is going to be blown up by the tank.  2) His gun is on his back (more obvious when you see it in motion, I admit) because he is 3) carrying something.  We can’t see what, of course.

Important fact about TV:  No shot is ever an accident.  This shot serves no purpose at all unless we’re supposed to notice something about it.  We see the walkway blow up, and then, a moment later, we see the tank, which never moves again after firing this shot, because Darryl blows it up moments later.

The orange truck is obscured , but would be on the right side of the screen.  Various carnagey things happen, Rick finds Carl, and then they go looking for Judith.  This is the first shot we get of the car seat:

Note the direction the tank is facing– Rick and Carl are walking in the same direction Tyreese was running– in other words, Tyreese was running away from the tank, but he was also running away from where the car seat was.

Here’s the next shot:

Note the orange truck in the background.  This is indisputably where Tyreese was coming from (he’s even on the right side of the walkway, running away from us, which makes sense given that he was coming from the car seat.)

The final bit of proof?

Gross?  Yes.  Bloody?  Yes.

And the straps are unbuckled.  Not torn, not ripped; in fact, other than the blood, and who knows what condition this car seat was in before they acquired it, there’s no damage to it at all.  I would like to submit that 1) zombies aren’t great with the manual dexterity, and I know grown adults (ahemmeahem) who have trouble wrestling kids out of these goddamn things, and furthermore 2) zombies aren’t big on wandering off with their food.  They eat right then and there; we’ve also just seen a shot of one crouching down to eat somebody.

Now, I know the argument that they’re not gonna show a half-eaten baby on TV.  Okay, fine.  But: they’ve already shown two completely destroyed car seats (T-Dog found them) with much clearer evidence that infants were brutally killed in them, and they’ve had at least two children actually literally shot in the head on-screen so far.  This isn’t just “avoid gore,” this is “avoid any proof at all.”  They didn’t have to show us what was in the car seat.  A zombie over the car seat would have been enough.

Why the blood?  Who knows; maybe she’s injured, maybe the seat was already stained with it and Tyreese got more on the outside.  But there’s no way all of this is an accident.

Judith is alive, and Tyreese has her.

The end.