Peanut Butter Protein Bar
S6 E1: First Time Again
The Walking Dead, 2010.
There are two kinds of apocalypse people: The ones who think in miles, barricades, and angles of sun. And the ones who think, with religious certainty, there was one more peanut butter left.
“First Time Again” opens like a corporate retreat icebreaker if the retreat were held on the lip of a granite quarry stuffed with thousands of hungry corpses. Rick stands above the herd the way a manager stands above a failing Q4, calm voice, loud eyes, a plan that depends on everyone doing their part and also on nothing going wrong. The plan is neat. The quarry is the world’s worst fishbowl. The trucks are corks. The walkers are champagne. And the universe, as always, is the guy who “just needs to adjust something real quick.”
The truck shifts. The rocks give. The exit opens. And suddenly Rick’s speech becomes the kind of speech you make while sprinting: less “tomorrow we begin,” more “today we improvise.”
A herd starts moving like a parade nobody asked for, led by Daryl’s motorcycle and flare guns, bright little promises that say look over here, death; the interesting thing is over here. Rick positions people in the woods to keep the line tidy, like traffic cops at a festival, except every attendee is trying to lick you. It’s an operation that requires discipline, patience, and the kind of calm you can only achieve when you’ve accepted you might have to stab someone you just met through the back of the head for screaming too loud.
And this is where the episode is quietly cruel: it keeps showing you how thin “community” is. Alexandria has walls, solar panels, dinner parties. Rick’s group has calluses and the vibe of people who’ve argued in the rain over who gets the last bullet. Put them together and you get a suburb learning, live and on camera, that survival is not a personality trait. It’s a muscle. And Rick, in a moment of deeply questionable pedagogy, tries to teach it by letting walkers get close enough that the Alexandrians can smell the lesson.
Meanwhile, the episode keeps cutting back in time, in black-and-white, like the show is flipping through a scrapbook. Deanna breaking, Gabriel being read for filth, Glenn doing the kind of morally complicated kindness that always seems to come with a receipt. And Morgan returns fully formed as a man trying to live by principle in a world that treats principle like a snack food: delicious, fragile, and gone the moment someone looks away.
Which brings us, naturally, to the snack food.
Morgan doesn’t ask Michonne about shelter. Or ammo. Or her life’s regrets. He asks her about the bar, specifically, whether she took one.
“See, I could have sworn there was one more peanut butter left.”
The line is funny because it’s so small in a world of so much. But it’s also devastating, because it’s exactly what grief does: it shrinks your mind down to one item you can count. One thing you can know. One thing you can be right about. If you can’t control the dead, at least you can control the inventory.
In the apocalypse, food is never just food. It’s proof of life. It’s proof you planned. It’s proof your past self cared enough to set something aside for your future self, an act of optimism so unhinged it loops back around to holy. Morgan’s peanut butter bar isn’t just calories, it’s an anchor. A familiar flavor. A tiny, wrapped reminder that he once lived in a world where peanut butter was not a plot point.
The best part is that the whole thing is a callback to a Season 3 scouting mission with Rick, Michonne, and Carl where we see Michonne doing the unthinkable: taking and eating one of Morgan’s bars while he’s passed out. It’s such a perfect little retroactive punchline: the apocalypse has continuity, and it’s mostly composed of petty theft and emotional consequences. When confronted in the moment Michonne, deadpan, offered the kind of excuse you can only get away with when you’ve saved everyone’s life at least twice: the mat said welcome.
So when Morgan fixates on the missing bar in Season 6, it’s not just a joke. It’s a nagging old wound resurfacing in the form of a snack wrapper. It’s Morgan saying: I remember what was taken from me. And it’s also Morgan testing something new and terrifying: trust. Because asking is what you do when you’re trying not to be the guy who just assumes and then kills you about it.
Michonne denies it (as one does), and Morgan responds with the most quietly tragic truth in the episode: you always think there’s one more peanut butter left. That’s not just about protein bars. That’s about people. Chances. Mercy. The version of yourself you’re hoping you can still be.
Make it! Homemade Peanut Butter Protein Bars from The Salted Sweets