The Walking Dead recap: The terrorists attack

The Walking Dead ended the first half of its third season with an episode that was thrilling and frustrating. Thrilling, because it finally collided the show’s two worlds — Rick Grimes’ prison-dwelling community of hunter-gatherers and the Governor’s wonderful little town-with-a-secret Woodbury — and the resulting conflagration played out like the strike-sparking first battle in an all-consuming war. (The battle on the Main Street of Woodbury felt like Call of Duty meets Red Dawn meets Lexington & Concord.) Frustrating, because in the process the episode showcased all the series’ faults. And it also made you wonder if those faults — which were almost entirely absent from the great four-episode sequence that started this season — are actually deeply ingrained in the show’s structure. Call it the Oscar Problem. The Walking Dead is so good at killing zombies, but it’s curiously inept when it comes to building actual characters — and since most new characters, like Oscar, seem to be just biding their time until their inevitable death scene, the whole show is filled with dead people walking. It makes you love a character like Merle: He might not make any sense at all, but at least he has a pulse.

It was the best of Dead, it was the worst of Dead: A midseason finale which left me feeling a bit grumpy, but which also had me on the edge of my seat, yelling at my TV set. The episode got off to a running start. The first shot was of the forest, dark and mysterious. I mentioned in last week’s recap that the whole idea of “The Forest” has become a weird running motif of this season: It’s a nowhere zone, a mystery box that might throw out a zombie herd or a brand new character. This week, it did both: A man named Tyreese ended a blonde walker with a really big hammer. Even if you haven’t read the Walking Dead comics, Tyreese instantly vibed important, because he was played by Chad Coleman. Coleman, as we all know, played the ex-con boxer/broken-soul-of-the-streets Cutty on The Wire. He was also, as I mentioned, carrying a Really Big Hammer. At this point, viewers of Walking Dead know that anyone with a Distinctive Weapon — crossbow, katana, Colt Python, knife-hand, any gun with a suppressor enhancement — is probably important.

Tyreese was traveling with a few people: a woman, and a father-mother-son family unit. They were fleeing a zombie herd. Tyreese said, “I thought a saw a tower past the trees.” They started running; Mom got walker-bit. They knew what they had to do. She was slowing them down. But they carried her along with them. (Rhetorical Question: When someone is Walker-Bit, is it more humane to let them die of a zombie bite — roughly equivalent to being poisoned — or to kill them, and end it faster? Which would you prefer? Personally, I prefer option C: Let me become a zombie and then eat my loved ones. Don’t be so selfish, family!) They clamored over a fence and walked into a broken-down building. The camera slowly panned right…and we saw the familiar barbed wire fence of the Lori Grimes Memorial Prison.

My first thought: “Say, this is a really smart trick! We knew they were going to introduce Tyreese, a fan-favorite character from the comic book, and we knew that Tyreese would find his way to the prison. But now it looks like he’s actually finding his way to the prison at some point in the future, when something terrible has happened at the prison, and it’s possible to just walk in from the outside! It’s a flashforward. That’s the only possible explanation, right? It’s not like the Grimes Gang, having specifically taken over the prison to create a safe space, would just happen to leave one corner of the fence wide open. Right?”

More on that later. Back at Woodbury, Andrea and her boy The Governor were starting another beautiful small-town day. Andrea had promised to help Milton bury Mr. Coleman. That left The Governor alone to talk to his beloved zombie daughter. He turned on a lovely little song — I’m not sure who was singing, but the lyrics are the old nursery rhyme “Bye, baby Bunting” — and let his daughter out of her little cage inside the wall. He tried to be gentle, but his little daughter doesn’t really know any emotion anymore, besides Pure Unrelenting Hunger. “Look at me!” he pleaded.

Over in Woodbury’s Abu Ghraib facilities, Glenn and Maggie were recovering from their respective tortures. “All this time running from walkers, you forget what people do,” said Maggie, helpfully paraphrasing this season’s tagline theme. In a moment that was simultaneously tender and terrifying, Glenn obliquely asked Maggie if the Governor had…done anything to her. (Maggie said no.) Then Glenn had a light bulb. He went over to the walker corpse lying on the ground and, in what amounts to the single grossest thing The Walking Dead has ever done, broke his arm off, then broke the arm in half, then pulled out some sharp walker bones: One for him, one for Maggie. Now, I’m not sure which bones these were. I’m no scientist. I have no clue if it’s actually possible to use decaying human bones as weapons. But that was awesome.

NEXT: The Governor plotsThe Governor was making plans with his trusty sidekick, Corporal Merle. Merle asked if the new plan was to move to the prison — a very secure facility, assuming nobody leaves a huge gaping hole in the fence around back where just anyone could walk in, but again, who would do that, that’s totally crazy, right? The Governor didn’t like that idea. “People love it here because it reminds them of what was,” he said. To get really heady for a second, there’s a fairly clear-cut political allegory circling around The Governor: He runs Woodbury on a platform of Benevolent Nostalgia, reaching back to a pacifistic ideal of pre-apocalyptic living, but he uses the image of that peaceful-nostalgic-happiness society to justify horrific violence and generally immoral activities. (I don’t think there’s an obvious political analogue — you could feasibly describe him as Nixon-esque, although a closer comparison is probably Bizarro Jimmy Carter.)

To get much less heady, The Governor had a fairly straightforward plan for the prison population: Terminate, with extreme prejudice. He allowed to Merle that they could turn Daryl into their inside man. But everyone else had to go. That included Glenn and Maggie: “Take ’em to the screamer pits.”

A few doors down, Rick Grimes and his Howlin’ Commandos were lurking inside of an apartment building. They weren’t sure if they could trust Michonne. (“Think she’s leading us into a trap?” asked Oscar — exactly the kind of thoughtful question we’ve come to expect from Good Ol’ Oscar, a character who was clearly going to be around for a very, very long time.) A Woodbury citizen walked into the room — he saw someone moving, and it was after curfew. The Melee Squad struck like lightning: “Ziptie him,” said Rick. The guy didn’t know anything about anyone being held hostage. He was just scared, and you had to be struck by what a scary bunch of people the Grimes Gang are: Rick, who appears to sweat blood; Daryl, looking for all the world like Pigpen with a crossbow; Michonne, perpetually holding her sword at people’s throats; Oscar, being Oscar.

Okay, okay, I’m acting grumpy about Oscar — we’ll discuss that in a moment. But give the show credit: Back at the prison, we finally got to spend a little bit of time with Axel, a.k.a. “The Inmate with a Beard.” He asked Beth how old she was. “17.” “17!” said Axel, “INTERESTING.” Carol said that she wanted to speak with him, and by “speak,” she meant “put the fear of god into him.” Axel begged. He’s been locked up a long while, and there ain’t a lot of women around. Maggie is with Glenn. And Carol is a lesbian. “I’m not a lesbian,” Carol said, amused. “You’re not a lesbian? My my, this is interesting,” said Axel.

Okay, back to Team Grumpy for a moment: Axel was introduced seven episodes ago. In that time, here are the two things we have learned about him:

1. He has a beard.

2. He is horny.

Maybe the show is just fundamentally better when it focuses on action. Back at the Woodbury Torture Center, Glenn and Maggie surprised Merle and his pal with their Stabbin’ Bones. Maggie straight-up ended one guy with a throat slash. Glenn couldn’t quite take down Merle. The point was moot: Merle’s boys came in and ended the scuffle. Glenn and Maggie were preparing for their final fate. Glenn: “Just keep looking at me.” At that moment, they put a burlap sack over Maggie’s head. But in the next moment, Rick Grimes and the Melee Squad strolled into the torture chamber. Because Daryl Motherf—ing Dixon always chooses the best loadout from the inventory screen, he had a few flashbang smoke grenades. They threw them, went in, grabbed Glenn and Maggie, and fired some shots.

My First Response To This Scene: “Awesome.”

My Second Response To This Scene, While Munching On Goldfish After The End of the Episode: “This was the first scene of the episode when extremely convenient grenades were used to specifically make sure that one character did not see another character.”

Everyone in Woodbury heard the shots fired. They were freaking out. The Governor played Mike Bloomberg. He told them to go home, stay inside, keep the lights off, read a book, stay inside. The Governor had a very different speech for his squad of killers. “You shoot to kill, uh huh?” he said. “Can’t take chances on these terrorists.”

NEXT: Daryl Motherf—ing Dixon chooses sidesAs they snuck through Woodbury, Glenn had bad news for Rick. “We told him where the prison was.” But Glenn had some outright crazy news for Daryl. “This was Merle,” he explained. “He threw a walker at me.” Daryl was flabbergasted: His brother, alive, terrorizing his friends? Daryl told Rick that he had to find Merle. Rick told him, “You’re not thinkin’ straight.” They had to get Maggie and Glenn home through the woods, and Michonne had disappeared into the shadows. “I need you. Are you with me?” he asked. Daryl: “Yeah.”

They made a break for it down Main Street. Daryl threw a few gas grenades; the sound attracted the Governor’s squad, and then the battle was joined. Andrea had been assigned to door-duty, but she took out her gun and ran toward the violence. She didn’t recognize any of her friends through the smoke. The only person she saw was Oscar, the Three-Dimensional Human Being Who Was Absolutely Not a Plot Contrivance. While Maggie and Glenn climbed up over the wall, Daryl and Rick laid down some covering fire. At that moment, Rick saw someone…familiar. Walking out of the smoke, with dead eyes, was none other than Shane, The Walking Dead‘s proto-Governor and Bizarro-Rick. Rick shot Shane…and it wasn’t really him, natch.

Team Grumpy again: Okay, we get it. Rick is feeling a bit haunted. Why would he suddenly, in the middle of a busy firefight, picture Shane — and not just Shane, but Shane with a beard he never had before? Frankly, this scene would have been better if he had imagined that everyone attacking him was Shane. ‘There’s Shane, BANG. There’s Shane, BANG. There’s Shane, too!'” See below:

Also: Oscar got killed. I’m always a bit concerned about bringing up anything too real-world with regards to a show about well-dressed zombie killers with infinite ammo, but: The same episode that introduces a new African-American dude also sees the demise of a different African-American dude? And this in a same half-season where pretty much the same thing happened a few episodes ago with T-Dog and Oscar?

Back at the prison, Carl heard some strange sounds in the tunnels. Hershel told him it was probably just walkers — which, again, seems like something that should be an issue when the entire purpose of living in the prison was having a walker-free existence. But Carl walked down into the tomblike corridors, walked into the boiler room…and found Tyreese and his crew. So, yes, the opening was not a flashforward. The Grimes Gang just left a handy opening in the fence towards the back of the prison. This strikes me as an oversight. I mean, what else do these people do all day, besides take every precaution to make sure they are not killed by zombies?

I’m being cruel to be kind, because the very next scene showed Walking Dead at its best. Waiting in The Governor’s house, Michonne heard some strange noises from behind the door. She kicked it open, and saw the Governor’s collection of heads. She was not too impressed by this Futurama homage. (She seemed to recognize either the pilot’s head or the heads of her former pets — it wasn’t clear.) But even worse was the noise from inside the wall. She opened up the door…and saw a little girl come out. She put down the sword, in a rare moment of tenderness. “It’s okay. I’m not gonna hurt you.” She took off the chain. She took off the head-sack — and realized that the girl was a walker. She was all set to decapitate, when the Governor suddenly appeared. “Don’t hurt her!” he begged.

NEXT: The Governor goes Full PirateYou might have figured that The Governor was going to pull some kind of oratorical plot with Michonne. But no: He took off his gun belt, and said pleadingly, “There’s no need for her to suffer.” Michonne responded: “She doesn’t have needs.” But she didn’t look at the Governor with hatred; it was more like pity. I figured that she was going to leave the man to his misery, right before she stabbed the little girl through her brain through her mouth with her katana. This was so wrong in so many ways that I have to set aside any question of moral decency and declare it the Zombie Kill of the Week, and to provide some emotional ballast, I can only note that the show missed a clear opportunity here to make a John Carpenter reference by giving the zombie daughter a cone of vanilla ice cream.

The fight that followed was vicious, all the moreso because it legitimately seemed like either character could die. Well, maybe not: The Governor is obviously the show’s Big Bad now, for the season if not forever, and the show has drunk too completely from the well of fan service to kill off a character like Michonne. But it felt brutal and vivid. The Governor was strangling Michonne; then she flipped him around and strangled him with her scabbard. There was biting, and various heads rolled. The Governor seemed to finally have the upper hand…until Michonne grabbed a piece of broken glass (ouch!) and stabbed it straight into his right eye (OUCH.) She was all set to put an end to him…until Andrea appeared, pointing a gun at her. “What have you done?” she said. They held their respective weapons on each other in a Mexican standoff, and Michonne slowly walked away.

Now, listen:

1. Michonne didn’t try to say anything. Anything. Admittedly, a complicated series of circumstances had led to that point. Admittedly, Michonne may have legitimately not realized that the Grimes Gang was Andrea’s old crew. But Michonne didn’t even try to say anything about tortured civilians, or about Merle hunting her in the forest. I guess you could argue that she was leaving Andrea to discover the zombie daughter or the heads in the jar, but this still seems like something that could have feasibly been a little bit worked out if Michonne had said anything.

2. I have never held a sword and have only fired a gun a couple of times, so maybe I’m wrong here. But if someone is holding a gun on somebody who is holding a sword, I’m pretty sure that the gun will win every time. Every time. So I guess the “Mexican Standoff” was more emotional than literal. But Michonne is a cipher, and Andrea is terrible, so I can’t say there were a ton of emotions in play in that scene.

3. It seems, in hindsight, like one of the main storylines of Season 3 Part 1 was Andrea’s gradual descent into the dark side — she went from having Michonne’s back to pointing a gun in her face. The problem with this, though, is that Andrea’s “descent” followed the Anakin Skywalker model: She has become accidentally evil. She’s on a passive journey — she’s a dupe, really. It’s a shame, because I think the thing to keep in mind is that you could feasibly argue that Woodbury’s mere existence justifies every bad thing the Governor does. All societies are born out of blood and violence. Imagine if Andrea knew about all the bad stuff, and still wanted to stay in Woodbury. Where would you rather live: The small-town hippie commune with UFC fights on the weekend, or the prison inhabited by mopey people who are really terrible at fence upkeep?

Speaking of that prison! Carl Grimes continued to prove that he should probably be in charge of the whole Grimes Gang. He allowed Tyreese and his crew to come to safety…but he also locked them up outside of the main cellblock. The woman with Tyreese complained, begging with him, explaining that they were good people. Tyreese, however, calmed her down: “This is the best we’ve had in weeks.” Then Tyreese turned around to finish off the walker-bitten mom. In a great and delicate moment, they covered her face before he bashed it in: A bit of humanity that went a long way towards indicating that these new arrivals are more than just meatbags awaiting a zombie bite.

NEXT: The Governor speechifiesI worry that I’m coming off like a full on Dead-hater. Nothing could be further from the truth. This season has been a great showcase for everything the show does well. When it’s good, it’s thrilling. But if there is one good thing about a midseason finale — and really, there’s not, which makes it annoying that it’s become such a common practice nowadays — it’s that it gives you a moment to look back over the episodes you’ve seen and try to understand what they mean for the episodes still to come. The closing scenes of the episode almost felt a little bit like the beginning of a mini-reboot for the show. If Season 3 Part 1 has been all about getting the chess pieces on the board, then these final scenes indicated that the game was really about to begin.

The Governor told Andrea that Michonne came back to kill him. Why? Who knows why? Andrea asked about the heads in the tanks, and the Governor came up with an explanation that made just a bit of sense. “I made myself look at them. To prepare me for the horrors outside.” Fair enough: He’s like the General who looks at the pictures of all his dead men, to remind him of the cost of war. (This is a lie, but it’s an effective lie.) Merle came in and promised to go after the attackers in the morning. With his one remaining eye, The Governor gave Merle a withering glare. Remember: Merle claimed that Michonne was dead.

Outside of Woodbury, Michonne found Rick, who was in a bad mood. Daryl had gotten lost along the way. He took Michonne’s sword from her. He asked, “Get what you came for?” Rick Grimes does not truck with personal vendettas: Membership in the Melee Squad is reserved for people who will watch each other’s backs. Michonne told him that he needed her help: To get Glenn and Maggie back, or to find Daryl. “Either way, you need me,” she said. And she’s right. Especially with Daryl gone, Rick needs an enforcer — and it’s tough to say no to the lady with the sword.

This was just a prologue to the best scene of the episode — a sequence which indicated that Walking Dead really does have more on its mind than relentless zombie-slaying. Proudly showing off his battle scars, looking like the modern incarnation of Odin One-Eye, The Governor told his assembled citizens that it had been a very bad night. Not just a bad night: It was the worst they had all felt since the apocalypse first happened, when “we all sat scared huddled in front of the TV.” I was all set to make a comparison between the Governor’s speech and the use of terrorist attacks as propaganda, when The Governor made that allegory explicit: “I’m afraid of terrorists who want what we have,” he said. It was a brilliant oratorical move: By using the “T” word, the Governor immediately established the Grimes Gang as an all-encompassing enemy, impossible to reason with, impossible to do anything but kill them.

NEXT: The enemy of my enemy is my enemyAnd then The Governor doubled down by noting that there was an enemy in their midst. “One of those terrorists is one of our own: Merle.” He said that Merle led them to Woodbury, that he let them in. “You lied,” he said. “You betrayed us all.” I think you can read this as simple punishment for Merle’s lies about killing Michonne, but it played perfectly for the crowd: The Governor had taken the abstract Terrorist enemy and made it concrete, right in front of them. Even better, he had another guy to throw to the crowd: “Merle’s own brother.” Out came Daryl Motherf—ing Dixon — clearly only pretending to be captured, right? right? — and the crowd chanted, “Kill ’em! Kill ’em!” The Governor gave Merle a dead stare: “You wanted your brother. Now you got ’em.” Meanwhile, Andrea looked down on the brewing carnage, with a look that seemed to say: “Bwaahhhhh????“

I’d be intrigued to know, fellow viewers, if you were frustrated that the show left off there. (It’s off the air until February.) Even though it wasn’t a huge cliffhanger, it did leave me wanting more. The Dixon Brothers are reunited, and are once again a hounded pair of outcasts. Rick is returning with the Melee Squad to a prison that has gained four new citizens, and also which really really needs to fix that back fence. The Governor looks to be turning into a full-on military dictator. Andrea is realizing that she may have kinda bad taste in men. It was a thrilling end that made me forgive some of the episode’s contrivances — unnecessary Oscar, imaginary Shane, the Mexican Standoff that wasn’t. The second half of Walking Dead‘s second season was a great follow-through, and it’s a fair bet that the Woodbury/Prison showdown will be a bloody affair indeed. Even if you’re skeptical, you can’t help but be intrigued.

My fellow Dead viewers, what did you like/loathe/feel neutral about? Sad to see Oscar go? Happy to see Tyreese arrive? Comic Book Fans: Are you as disappointed as I am that this Tyreese apparently doesn’t have a certain daughter or a certain boyfriend?

And let’s get big-think here: What do you want to see in the show’s back-half? Trench warfare? A gunfight between The Governor and Rick? A little bit of romance? An episode of The Dating Game where Michonne chooses between Daryl, Rick, Tyreese, and Axel? Anything is possible. See you in February.

Darren on Twitter: @DarrenFranich