What happened?
Michonne tells Rick about how Glenn and Maggie have been taken, and so they and a few others venture to scope out Woodbury and see about reclaiming their people. Meanwhile in Woodbury, Merle and The Governor employ interrogation methods to eventually learn that Rick's people are holed up at the prison. Andrea also oversees an experiment to try and determine if the walkers retain any semblance of their former consciousness after they have turned - the results seem to conclude that they do not!
Thoughts
Season 3 is shaping up to be, by a clear margin, the strong outing yet for The Walking Dead. Whilst I thought the first season felt a little tame in places it served as a strong introduction. Season 2, carried the sense that it dragged a little too long at the farm and had a little too much moral debating but still, for me, kicked ass. But this season has taken things up another notch. Every episode has something cool and the lulls in the action are usually timing devices before a surprise or action beat kicks in. And what has really been good is that all the tension has slowly been winding us up to the point where this episode ended - with Rick and The Governor at the threshold of crossing swords.
Merle's torture techniques opened the episode, and right from the get-go it was clear we were supposed to hate the guts of the man for hurting our lovely Glenn! Having Maggie able to hear her love getting the snot pounded out of him only generated further anger. But if The Walking Dead has been toying with the idea of presenting The Governor as a horribly flawed but righteous man then that was tugged loose when he decided to take a crack at breaking Maggie for himself. Rather than go for violence, as Merle did with Glenn, he went for something altogether worse.
Making Maggie undress and threatening to rape her showed us that there is a distinct lack of compassion in his heart and a ruthlessness to do whatever it takes to get what he wants. In truth this wasn't anything that came as a surprise - his assault on the soldiers, or sending Merle and his men to get Michonne after she had left already indicated he was a nasty, untrustworthy piece of work. But I did get the feeling that The Walking Dead has been making some efforts to get us, the audience, on his side, identifying with him. However, by the end of this episode, I don't believe we're supposed to feel any kind of conflict about who we're rooting for.
When it comes to the showdown between Rick and The Governor, we're with Rick all the way. When Glenn told Merle that his people would be coming for him we wanted it to be true, and to result i Merle getting his ass handed to him by a Rick-shaped size 10 boot.
Getting Glenn and Maggie out of Woodbury won't be easy, yet there are one or two uneasy alliances in The Governor's ranks. He did check that Merle was still to be counted on despite the fact that Daryl, his brother, is effectively the enemy. Whilst Daryl has come a long way in proving his loyalty to Rick ("It's what we do," he remarked, when Rick thanked him for getting baby supplies whilst he was going out of his mind) I didn't get a matching sense of allegiance from Merle to The Governor. Mind, I don't see Merle ever finding a warm welcome from Rick's group, either, so he'd be just as well to stay true to Woodbury.
Quite how the two brothers will react when they meet is just as interesting as to how Rick and The Governor will square up. Fingers crossed Daryl doesn't do something stupid, but with Carol back in the fold then it's hard to imagine him turning his back on Rick and the rest now. No, I suspect it's going to come down to a more straight out piece of brotherly squabbling with deadly results. If Merle is going to be taken down by anyone then, yeah, I'd say Daryl will be the one.
Meanwhile there's Andrea, who I figured would become queen to The Governor's king, and there's little here to dissuade me from that view. Only Michonne could really be the one that might be able to bring Andrea around to Rick's side of things, but then Michonne is hardly a fully paid up, card carrying member of Rick's clan either.Yet. There were small beats that suggested Michonne would be converted. Like how she witnessed the group's joy at finding Carol was still alive, and also how she watched Rick's well-drilled group take out the walkers in the woods. There was admiration in her expression. Probably he didn't realise it, but Rick telling her they would patch her up and send her on her way was precisely the kind of reception she could trust (as opposed to The Governor's false warm welcome).
As the fun scene in the cabin showed, she's an able and dependable asset and she slotted right in with the group. She took down the gibbering man with the shotgun in the cabin and didn't flinch when Rick came up with the bright idea of feeding the fresh cadaver to 'the alamo' of walkers at the front door so they could escape out of the back. Michonne fit right in, no question.
The small subplot with the terminal patient- Mr. Coleman - willing to die under controlled conditions and try to replicate the behaviour he had been taught after he turned did make me think there would be some evidence to support the theory. I didn't like the idea, however. But I thought that since the show was taking time out to present this, and doing so in some detail, I didn't feel like it was possible that it would just go without some new revelation. I'm glad it didn't. I'm glad that Andrea simply had to step in and put the walker down, proving her opinion that the moment they turned they become monsters.
It's not that I wouldn't have found it believable - the personality and memory of a person is all found in the brain, and it's fundamentally brain functionality that powers a walker, so it would make a certain sense that the same brain, re-activated after death, could retain some trace personality and memories. I do just prefer the walkers to be these instinct-driven 'monsters'. Going down the route of the walkers retaining humanity is never going to be a good move - other zombie movies have done similar things (Day Of The Dead with the 'Bub' character and rather a lot of Land Of The Dead, for anyone interested in my source references) and it is always, always a weakening of the premise.
No, keep the walkers as the mindless, ever-hungry, ceasless horde, thank you very much.
What was the best part?
Showing just how far he has come, and how much the winter has shaped him, Glenn's battle against the walker unleashedin the room whilst he was strapped to a chair was gripping stuff. Merle scarcely gave Glenn much of a fighting chance, which is what made the scene work even better. The zombie was let loose and Glenn had to think and act fast to get out of it alive. Dodging its lunges, using a bare mattress as a shield and then eventually shattering his chair to use as a weapon. Boom. One chair leg through the skull later and a bloodied, animalistic Glenn was a fully-fledged zombie-slaying hero. A superbly choreographed and shot scene with a satisfyingly enjoyable end. A small triumph in a rather grim episode.
What do I think will happen next?
Here's an interesting concern. Whilst The Governor sends people out to the prison to see what's what, Rick and the gang may have their best chance yet to get in to Woodbury and get back Glenn and Maggie. Will it be a totally stealthy, clean in and out swipe? Maybe. But probably not. A worst case scenario could be, however, that whilst Rick and the rest are away then the prison is infiltrated and The Governor's gang get their hands on Rick's baby daughter. In trying to imagine the most awful thing that could be done, my mind latches on to that. And I also fear for Maggie's safe return. Whilst the two new convicts are the most likely to get killed (on account of being new and barely known) if any more of the core group are at risk, she's the one I think. I really hope I am wrong on that. As well being a major blow to the group, it would be just about the cruellest thing to hit Hershal and Glenn. Even for The Walking Dead that would be a step too far, right?
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