**SPOILER ALERT** **LONG BLOG POST ALERT*
Friday evening saw the mid season finale of The Walking
Dead season 3. Season 1 was powerful,
short and sharp. Season 2 was long, with
all of the action saved up purely for the final episode. Season 3 needed to be good, it needed to be
the perfect mixture of character development and action. Just like season 1.
So far, so good.
Now, during my season 2 finale review, I got myself a bit
overwhelmed by everything. Season 3 is
proving to be far greater than 2, so I’m going to be very careful not to fall
into the same trap. Instead of covering
the whole of the first half of season 3, I will focus on the key elements.
First, a little background.
Rick and his group, including a heavily
pregnant Lori, find and take the prison.
At the same time, Andrea and Michonne stumble across the
Governor and a much missed Merle Dixon who take them to Woodbury, a town with a
wall built around it and run by the Governor.
Back in the prison, Lori gives birth and we lose some
characters that have been with us since the very beginning.
Michonne doesn’t trust the Governor (because she’s smart)
and she leaves the town. Merle is sent
after her to finish her. She fights
back, as Michonne does, and goes into the ‘red zone’. Merle decides she’s dead already and returns, telling the Governor that he’s killed her.
On his way back to the town (one has to assume), he comes
across Glen and Maggie who are doing a supply run for baby formula. He attacks and takes them back to
Woodbury. Michonne witnesses all of this
and takes the formula to the prison.
Meanwhile, Andrea demonstrates her wonderful taste in men
by sleeping with the Governor.
Michonne tells Rick about Maggie and Glen and a small
party leaves for Woodbury to get their people back. The mid-season finale finishes with Glen and
Maggie being rescued and Michonne and the Governor having a show down, with
the Governor coming worse off.
Lori’s death
The most memorable death in The Walking Dead so far is
one without any zombie in sight. Ok, so
zombies attack which means that Lori, Carl and Maggie get separated from the
group and have to hide. Naturally this
is when Lori goes into labour.
I’ve already written about Lori’s death because it did
truly move me. After two and half
seasons of being sick and tired of Lori, finally her character did something
that made me feel
for her.
Lori’s death scene was the best bit of Lori. She handed over the matriarch torch to
Maggie, she said her final farewell to her son and she gave her life so that
her child would live. Her beautiful,
tearful death had a knock on effect on a number of characters. Carl became a man, being the only one
available to put his mother down, Maggie was forced to step up by being the one
to remove the baby from Lori’s body and, of course,
Rick...
Rick
Strangely while Lori was dying, I didn’t even think of
Rick. All of my thoughts were on Carl
and what losing his mother and having to put a bullet through her head would do
to him. At the end of the episode when
Rick finds out, I was shocked that he didn’t even go near his son. All I wanted was for him to put an arm around
his boy.
It makes sense that Rick would lose it so violently. He had just lost his wife and didn’t even get
a chance to say goodbye. More than that,
theirs was not a healthy relationship.
That baby probably isn’t even his, his wife cheated on him with his best
friend, told him to kill his best friend and then shunned him when he did the
deed out of self defence. She admitted to
being a bad wife but they had still not resolved their issues by the time Lori
died and that would have played heavily on Rick’s conscience.
The episode where Rick loses his mind is, similar to the
episode of Lori’s death, done beautifully.
Andrew Lincoln plays Rick flawlessly, dishevelled and with painfully,
heart breaking mad eyes.
His loss was extreme.
Not even looking at his poor son, he picks up an axe and storms through
the prison splitting the skulls of Walkers until he finds the remains of his
wife and the zombie that has feasted on her.
Then the phone rings.
In the comic books, Rick sees visions of his wife after
her passing. It is unclear whether this
will happen in the television series but this phone call may have been the
beginning of it. Allowing the viewer a
false sense of hope, we watch as Rick begins to unravel and lose his mind.
Strangely, by the next episode he seems to have ravelled
it back up again. Enough to speak to his
son, hold his new daughter, retake leadership, deal with Michonne and go to
Glen and Maggie’s rescue. Maybe he just
needs to keep busy...
The Governor
There were three things that die hard Walking Dead fans
were looking forward to this season; the prison, Michonne and the Governor. David Morrissey, taking the part of the
Governor, did not disappoint.
The Governor is suave, sophisticated, often quiet with the
kind of gentleness that an angry tiger bestows right before going for the kill.
His evil is hinted at throughout, building to a crescendo
by the mid-season finale. Although the
real hint of what this man is capable of came in the penultimate episode.
When Glen and Maggie are held prisoners in Woodbury,
Merle concentrates on his old chum Glen.
The Governor says that he will speak to Maggie. Making Maggie stand before him, he takes off
his gun holster and forces her to remove her top and bra. He walks around the exposed Maggie, pushing
her down onto the table. I don’t think I
could have hated him more than in that moment.
Of course, the best villains have a softer side. They are human, after all. The Governor’s weakness is his daughter,
Penny. In a gut wrenching moment in the
finale, Michonne, while waiting for the Governor to return to his rooms, finds
Penny trustled up in her cage. Thinking
the worse, Michonne frees the child only to discover that the girl is in fact a
Walker. The Governor stops her just
before she puts Penny down. To his
horror, Penny is killed before the Governor’s eyes and he lunges at
Michonne. All of the pent up rage and
grief of a father who has been unable to let go of his child and has just seen
her ripped from him is aimed straight at Michonne.
He is a triumph of a character and he's only going to get better.
Merle Dixon
Both the Governor and Michonne survive their
encounter. Merle might not be so
lucky. Remember, he told the Governor
that Michonne was dead? And yet there
she was, slicing a sword through the Governor’s zombie daughter’s head. Not only that, but Daryl was left behind
during Maggie and Glen’s escape.
Merle has been an interesting character throughout season
3. We didn’t get to learn a lot about
him in season 1, only that he’s a racist, narrow minded red neck with a
military background and has spent time in the joint.
At first I didn’t understand why Merle, who fought for
leadership in season 1, would take orders from someone like the Governor. I put it down to fear, knowing that the
Governor was possibly the best villain in The Walking Dead. Or maybe it was about respect – the Governor
trusted and respected Merle to do his dirty work.
As time went on, the viewer was allowed to see chinks in
Merle’s submissiveness. All Merle wants, it
seems, is his brother back. The arrival
of Andrea gives him new hope which the Governor immediately dashes. Merle then lies to the Governor about killing
Michonne – maybe because he didn’t get his own way.
The writers, and Michael Rooker who plays Merle, cleverly
gave the character layers which is more than I was expecting. I still don’t know if
Merle is a good or bad guy. Maybe he’s
the grey.
As the season went on, Merle seems to become more and
more quietly frustrated, taking the brunt of this out on Glen, but never
showing any weakness to the Governor. It
seems that Merle has more control and intelligence then at first made out. And why not?
Him and Daryl are of the same blood.
The ending of the mid season finale was very clever. I almost applauded the writers. Who is the television fan favourite of The
Walking Dead? Daryl Dixon. Who was the most talked about character for
season 3? Well, apart from the Governor
and Michonne? Merle Dixon.
What is the best way of making sure everyone tunes into
the season return next year? Putting
the Dixon brothers in trouble.
We ended on an angry Governor, with his town around him,
blaming the violence and deaths of some of their people on Merle Dixon. And oh look, they caught one of the
intruders. None other than Merle’s baby
brother. What is to be done with them?
So Merle and Daryl come face to face for the first time
in the entire Walking Dead programme. No
words are exchanged, only looks, as the towns people surround them chanting ‘Kill
them! Kill them!’
So there you have it.
A fantastic first half to an explosive season. The writers seem to be coping with the huge cast by fully developing a selection of main characters and leaving the others to quietly get on with it. Other than the obvious highlights (the
Governor, Merle and Daryl Dixon, Lori’s death), one of the more surprising best
bits for me was Glen and Maggie.
The Governor didn’t touch Maggie, not in an abusive
sense. Although what he did was still
disgusting and unforgiveable. She still
didn’t give in. She told him to just get
on with it. She was strong, a true
matriarch.
And what about Glen in the room next door? Merle beat him until he was swollen and
bloody and when he still wouldn’t talk, Merle left him alone with a
Walker. That was when Glen came into his
own. His hands fastened to the arms of a
chair, he fought and defeated the zombie, giving a scream of defiance as he did
so.
Go Glen!
Unfortunately, Maggie spilled the beans of the prison
when she was thrown in with Glen and a gun was put to her young lover’s
head. Oh, Maggie.
I urge everyone to watch The Walking Dead, whether you’re
already a fan or not. This season is definitely
worth it. We’re now left with the
Governor knowing a group of survivors exists within the prison and that
Michonne, his daughter’s murderer, is probably with them.
And what about Merle and Daryl Dixon? We’ve finally seen them together (I’ve been
waiting a long time to see their true brotherly relationship unfold). Could their reunion be over far too quickly?
The Walking Dead is back on FX (soon to be FOX) in
February 2013, at the same time as America (yay!).
No comments:
Post a Comment