There are those in The Walking Dead who accept the New Reality – Hell is other people, not all of them dead – and there are those who don't.

This episode – the so-called mid-season finale, with obligatory cliff-hanger ending – opens in the bedroom of Sam Anderson (Major Dodson), the younger son of Jessie (Alexandra Breckenridge) and her late brute of a husband Pete. Toys litter the carpet as he draws in crayons and Tiptoe Thru the Tulips plays on the stereo; clearly, young Sam is a denier.

But this season has been all about the impossibility of keeping the outside horrors at bay, and as the camera follows a line of ants from the window to the half-eaten meal Sam has left on the floor, it's a portent of what's coming. No pocket money.

Well, that and the herd.

We saw the tower begin to topple last week; now it lands with a thud, taking a great chunk of Alexandria's precious wall with it. As the dust cloud erupts, there's a moment of stillness in which you can hear a bird twitter, and then the herd floods in.

Inside Alexandria, it's sheer chaos. Everyone is running for cover. Deanna (Tovah Feldshuh) trips and stumbles onto a circular saw blade. Carol (Melissa McBride) trips and hits her head. Maggie (Lauren Cohan) scrambles to the lookout post on the wall, out of bullets but not quite out of luck. Though with no water, no food and no way out, the jury is out on that one.

As Carl (Chandler Riggs) and Jessie's other son, sulky-pants Ron (Austin Abrams), join Michonne (Danai Gurira), Gabriel (Seth Gilliam) and a bunch of others, Rick is briefly possessed by the boundlessly cheery spirit of a Christian summer camp leader. "Good," he says. "You're safe."

Under the circumstances, I'd say that's insanely glass-half-full of him.

There is one tiny skerrick of good news amid all this catastrophe, though: our back-from-the-dead hero Glenn (Steven Yeun) can now see a way back to Alexandria. Though frankly, why would you want to go back in there? I mean, Maggie is cute and all, but still…

Enid (Katelyn Nacon) thinks he's off his Lazarus-shaped rocker. "This is how it happens," she says. "And it always happens, Glenn." The end, she means. Death and all that.

Glenn tells her they've got friends in there, people who care about her, his pregnant wife. "You want to run away, be afraid, forget about this? Just go," he says. "But that's how you lose people – even after they're gone."

I can see my house from up here: Back-from-the-dead Glenn (Steven Yeun) and I-don't-want-to-be-here Enid (Katelyn Nacon) survey the carnage.

The world's least-qualified doctor, Denise (Merritt Wever), is down in a basement enjoying a sparkling tete-a-tete with the captured Wolf man (Australian actor Benedict Samuel, late of The Beautiful Lie). It's like her faith in human nature has come face to face with his brutal opportunism. Who is your money on?

Upstairs, as Michonne is tending to Deanna's wound, she pulls back the dressing and discovers a bite. "Well, shit," says Deanna. She knows how it will end, the only way it can end. This is how it happens, and it always happens.

Michonne tells Deanna she saw the plans she drew up for en expansion of Alexandria, that she gets it, that she thinks it could work.

"Even now?"

"Even now," Michonne says. Is this genuine optimism or just palliative care?

Michonne is puzzled about the Latin phrase Deanna scribbled on the plans, though: "Dolor hic tibi proderit olim." What did it mean?

It was something her husband Reg – the architect of this near-Utopia – used to say when things got bad, she says, kind of dodging the question because she can't get Google translate up just at the moment.

"I'm lucky, Michonne," says Deanna, who has seen her husband decapitated, her dream overrun by the undead, her son revealed as a cowardly drunk, and her own life brought to an abrupt end by a blade and a bite.

Man, I'd hate to see her definition of unlucky.

"Working with my family towards a better future was all I ever wanted," she continues. "That's what I got. I got to do what I wanted right up to the end."

Put that sword away, girlfriend: Deanna (Tovah Feldshuh) lets Michonne know she'll be the one dealing the final blow, when she's good and ready.

In the garage of Jessie's house, Carl finds Ron, and offers the kind of solace only the deluded can muster. "My dad's gonna figure something out," says Number One Son. "He always does."

"That's bullshit," says Ron, who is a total douche but in this respect at least is spot-on. "Your dad's just going to get more people killed, because that's what he does, that's who he is. He's a killer."

"So was yours."

You are.

You are.

No, you are.

Ron looks stunned, like he hadn't thought this whole father-son thing through. Wait, you're saying my dad was an asshole? Just because he was a drunk and beat the crap out of my mother and bullied me and my brother into terrified submission? No waaay…?

He sure as hell hasn't thought through his next act of pure genius, which is to smash a pane of glass in the garage while trying to take Carl's head off with a shovel (dude, you're supposed to kill him first, then bury him). That's the cue for the undead to come pouring into the house, and for the house to stop being a refuge. Not that it ever really was, not for Jessie at least, and not really for her kids either.

Time out here: Can I just say how much I love the way this season has gone there on the domestic abuse issue, calling out the neighbours who did nothing to stop it; showing young Sam as a kid whose defence was to retreat into fantasy, to block out the "monster" that was his father at his drunken worst; showing Jessie playing dead and then taking it out on that Wolf back in episode two; above all, having her transformation echo that of Carol's over the preceding five seasons, from cowed victim to assertive defender of what's Right and Good. It's in this kind of stuff – always operating at a level just below explicit – as much as the big narrative turns that The Walking Dead keeps surprising us.

Ahem.

Back to the blood and guts.

Somewhere in the house baby Judith is crying. The noise will attract zombies – like they need any encouragement – so Rick dashes off to find her. He opens the door to her room to see Deanna leaning over the crib. Rick pulls out his axe and is about to split her skull open when she says "It's still me". She just wanted one last glimpse of the future. He really does need to vet the babysitters more thoroughly.

Rick tells Deanna she can't be left on her own any longer, because she will turn sooner or later. She asks him to look after her dim-witted son Spencer as if he were one of Rick's people. "They're all your people now," she tells this reluctant Moses of the South, adding it's not just because he can grow an awesome beard either.

In a garage somewhere, Tara (Alanna Masterson), Rosita (Christian Serratos) and Eugene (Josh McDermitt) are waiting it out. Eugene is reading a History of the World by the flame of his Zippo. Maybe he's thinking those who forget are destined to repeat. Or maybe he's just trying to forget the 20-deep nightmare on the other side of that roller-door.

Rick remembers, though. When the herd breaks into Jessie's house, he proposes the survivors gut a couple of zombies and cover themselves in their entrails, then make a dash for the armoury. "I've done it before," he says, and he's harking back to season one, when this stunt worked a treat until it started raining.

They're all slathering the guts over sheets, then donning the sheets like some creepy spin on the Shroud of Turin. I bet it smells like spleen spirit in there.

Gabriel (Seth Gilliam) and Ron (Austin Abrams) don zombie guts for the neighbourhood fancy-dress party.

Michonne takes a moment out from whipping up her batch of Eau de Morte to visit Deanna, and once more offers to end it for her before they leave.

"No, I'm not ready," says Deanna, who is perhaps starting to think Michonne is a little too eager to lop her head off with that sword of hers. "And when I am, I'll do it." She pulls out her revolver. "It's my life, start to finish." (And that's how we get our title this week, folks.)

Finally, Deanna tells Michonne what the Latin meant: "Some day this pain will be useful to you." I tell you, if Dying With Dignity is looking for a poster girl, Deanna is it.

As the gang are lathering up in zombie guts, Sam emerges, looking petrified (which is to say, his normal self). A tiptoe through the tulips this is not.

Jessie tells him he needs to pretend not to be afraid, to pretend to be brave, to pretend the monsters don't exist. You just know she's had this conversation with him before, back when Pete was ruling his kingdom of terror.

Down in the basement, Carol and Morgan are still tussling over the captive Wolf. She wants him dead; Morgan thinks that would make them no better than the Wolves. They fight. Morgan wins. The Wolf knocks him out and takes Denise hostage. That's vengeance 1, forgiveness 0.

That's not a knife, this is a knife: Carol (Melissa McBride) and Morgan (Lennie James) have a full and frank discussion about the best way to deal with Wolves.

Rick and the others wander through the herd looking like extras in a Lady GaGa video, while Deanna gets off her deathbed to open the door on a hall full of zombies. She fires off her six bullets, leaving nothing for herself. Silently, she screams in the face of death, one last act of defiance and self-determination.

The death-sheet gang walk hand-in-hand into the herd, and then Sam forgets to forget the monsters. Or maybe he succeeds in forgetting just how awful the situation is. "Mom," he says, over and over, each time louder than the last.

End credits.

But wait, there's more: the now-obligatory mid-season finale coda.

A gang of bikies blocks the road where Daryl (Norman Reedus), Abraham (Michael Cudlitz) and Sasha (Sonequa Martin-Green) are tooling along in the petrol tanker. Their leader tells them to get out or they'll be split "right in two, straight through to the sinuses". Everything they own now belongs to Neegan, he says. I'm going out on a limb here, but I don't think that's a good thing.

So, to recap our recap. Rick and co are surrounded by zombies with a walking "waa-waa" alarm called Sam in their midst; Maggie is stuck on top of a watchout on the wall, with no food, no water, and no way out; Daryl and co have just met the Saviours, who are really anything but.

That leaves Glenn and Enid as the only hope.

I know he's risen from the dead and all, but it's going to take a much bigger miracle than finding a bunch of balloons and a cylinder of helium for Glenn to turn this one around.

Karl Quinn is on Facebook and on twitter @karlkwin