The Walking Dead, Season 3, Episode 10: Home
Yeah, not the best showing for our heroes in the Walking Dead. Really, with all the men clamouring to take charge, none of them bar Hershel really make a good case for it. Rick's gone straight off the deep end, wandering outside the prison compound looking for images of his wife. Glenn's still hot off the whole torture thing, very much wanting to take revenge and go on the offensive, pissed off at Daryl abandoning them and Rick being crazy. Daryl is off trying to hang out with Merle, but the character development he's gotten since then is getting in the way. Carl's a sullen kid, Hershel's old and tired, and Axel's a nonentity.
Rick and Glenn, in particular, don't really make very good showings of themselves here. Neither does Merle, but Merle was always a sack of shit, as Daryl so eloquently puts it. Rick really should've been tied up like that one crazy dude from the first season, because as much as he tries to be in charge and shoos away perfectly nice help in Tyreese's group (who's completely absent in this episode) the lunatic just wanders out of the prison compound, leaving doors open (thankfully Michonne's there, right?) to look for hallucinations of his dead wife. It's a miracle no walker jumped him then and there. Not the biggest fan of Rick right now, especially when his pointless Twilight-style vision chasing ends up with him in a position where he's vulnerable to zombie hordes and he can't help his friends out when the Governor attacks at the climax of the episode.
Glenn's also being very hot-headed, though his frustration at the Governor's torture of him and Maggie (he assumes Maggie was raped, though, while she affirms that nothing happened beyond the stripping) and his irritation at Rick going all cuckoo is evident. He's angry, and his fraying relationship with Maggie -- of which I'd say neither party is in the wrong, it's just very short-triggered emotions and a general fact that there's no real right protocol to deal with victims of sexual assault -- is causing him to get into some really questionable choices. Like randomly taking a car out for a drive presumably for no reason other than to clear his mind. Of course Glenn also does this utterly stupid thing right before the Governor attacks, leaving their prison even more vulnerable.
So yeah, if I was keeping score, neither Rick nor Glenn really appealed to me this point. The real standout scenes go to the Dixon brothers. The prison scenes are just blah right up until the Governor shows up with his army of soldiers and machineguns and battering-ram vans filled with walker cargo. The Woodbury scenes prior aren't much to talk about either, just obvious filler and transition scenes. We've got Andrea being congratulated for her speech, we've got the Governor back to his old self and smoothly dodging questions about his weird zombie daughter and whatever, and we've got the Governor's interactions with Milton and getting him squarely on his side.
So yeah, the Dixon brothers. We finally get a chance to see the two of them separated from the rest of the group. Daryl and Merle caring for each other is evident from how they are willing to just drop everything to rescue the other, and, well, Merle is still a douchebag. Being someone's brother means you just have a higher tolerance to your sibling's antics, and Daryl is practically a saint for taking on all the vitriol that Merle launches at him, mocking his newfound code of honour and continually mocking Rick. It's a very nice bit of character development for Daryl when he corrects Merle dismissing Glenn as a Chinaman, when a season or two ago it's Daryl that gets corrected for calling Glenn exactly the same thing.
We get a very awesome scene as Daryl gets spurred into action when a random family is besieged by a horde of zombies. Merle ends up only getting a couple of kills out of indifference while Daryl massacres the whole thing, and the two brothers come to blows when Merle is ready to just loot the poor family's car, while Daryl pulls out his crossbow and aims it at Merle. The two come to butt heads over this decision, and Daryl's newfound decency ends up spiraling to a different argument altogether. Merle confronts Daryl for 'abandoning' him, playing that card again, but Daryl notes rightfully that Merle cut off his own hand, and Daryl came back for Merle. There's some talk about how Merle is the one who keeps leaving Daryl behind, something that's an obvious reference to an abusive father considering how Merle just quickly mellows down from being ready to physically beat Daryl up to a stammering apology.
Daryl elects to return to the prison, whether Merle likes it or not, because he realizes that he belongs there far more than being the subject of verbal abuse by Merle, and the two Dixon brothers arrive in time to rescue crazy Rick from a horde of zombies. Yeah, even Merle and his cool blade-hand.
Let's talk about the climax. After putting the wool over Andrea's eyes, the Governor leads a strike team to the prison, and, well, seems to pick the time to attack briefly after Glenn leaves, so Glenn's stupid little tantrum might actually be the catalyst for the Governor's attack. Axel gets shot in the head immediately after giving some superficial backstory in an attempt to flirt with Carol. Whoops, bye, Axel, we barely knew you. That's all of the prisoner group dead, and honestly I would actually argue with Glenn's sentiment a couple of episodes ago -- why even bother? Still, it's a sudden and effectively surprising death, with the group in the prison quickly shaken into action.
I do like how utterly unprepared they were. Daryl and Glenn are missing, of course, and Rick is outside of the compound, but the group are so used to shooting zombies that don't shoot back, and it's very clear that a lot of them are very inexperienced. Take Carl, for example, usually very confidently mowing down zombies with the most detached look a ten-year-old kid can have, and here, faced with thugs who shoot back, he doesn't know when to peek from his cover and all that. Beth is barely a factor, and Michonne is hilariously bad with a gun -- which is to be expected considering she's a sword nut. Maggie's the only one who gets a kill, shooting one of the Governor's snipers... but not before the Governor unleashes a battering ram van that unleashes a wave of zombies into the courtyard.
The Governor has some really fun poses there where he's clearly mocking and testing the prison's defenses, and they did force him to retreat, but it's definitely a loss for the prison crew as now the courtyard is once more filled with walkers, and the big gate is mangled.
So yeah, a pretty fun little conflict, but my favourite scene in this episode definitely has to be Merle and Daryl, where the two actors have such great chemistry where they're clearly being abrasive jerks (of a differing scale, but still) to each other but you can still feel the brotherly bond they share.
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