The Walking Dead S03E16 Review: Proactive Murder

The Walking Dead, Season 3, Episode 16: Welcome to the Tombs

Okay, it's a bit of a disappointing end as far as season finales go, but as part of what's presumably an overreaching story it's a good enough entry. I think the biggest problem is the huge, huge build-up that basically every episode after the kidnapping of Glenn and Maggie had to this promised big war between the Woodbury residents and Team Rick, which did happen, in a way, but ended very quickly before the halfway mark, with a lot of this final episode of season three devoted more to tying up loose ends, showing the Governor's insanity, killing off Andrea (yay!) and some cold hard truth from Carl about being proactive.

So yeah. It's a good story, and if this was somewhere in the middle of a season I would praise this a lot. The problem is, as a season finale, it doesn't quite have any sort of satisfying conclusion at all, and both the action and emotion doesn't quite reach the heights of, say, the episode where Lori died, or the first raid mission on Woodbury, or the final episodes of season two with the Shane confrontation and the farm being overrun.

This episode spends a lot of time with Andrea, too, who we last saw in the Governor's torture room strapped to a chair. We also address the Milton problem, which is a shame because I feel like we didn't quite have enough time with Milton -- he's interesting, but ultimately more of a plot device than a character. The Governor beats Milton up a bit, and when he fails to prove his loyalty and kill Andrea, instead turning on the Governor, the Governor stabs him and leaves him to die, because he will kill Andrea anyway when he becomes a walker. I think the episode spends way too much time with Andrea trying to break free with the pliers that Milton dropped behind her, which took a lot of time. And she keeps stopping every time Milton says something, which is just dumb. Only for Team Rick to later find Andrea having killed the Milton zombie, but not before she gets bitten.

It's a bit of a strange death because honestly it gets dragged on for so long for... what? The false hope that she'll escape? The awesome line from the Governor that "if you die, you kill"? Really, Andrea should've just died at the end of her focus episode, gunned down by the Governor as she reaches the prison. She'll still have a chance to crawl up to Rick and company and have a tearjerking death... but so much of her writing is so muddled, and apparently the big reason for her actions? She doesn't want anyone to die. Yeah. Naive girl. She's dead, though, so that's another poorly-plotted and poorly-written character gone from the cast, which I'm glad.

Ultimately what happened to Andrea reinforces Carl's point of view in this episode, about proactive killing. It's very cold, and to Hershel's horror at one point in the episode Carl shot a surrendering young Woodbury soldier in the head when he's clearly handing his weapon over. Carl's point of view isn't wrong, as cold-blooded as he is, and he has a point. If Carl hadn't killed the walker that eventually killed Dale, he would've been alive. If Rick had been decisive about killing Andrew, Lori would've been alive. If Rick had killed the Governor in the meeting, Merle wouldn't have died. And that applies to Andrea as well -- if she had taken one of the two chances she could have had to kill the Governor, none of this would happen. She wouldn't have died, Milton wouldn't have died, and the 'good people of Woodbury' that she championed so hard during her arguments with Rick wouldn't have died. 

The Governor is also intriguing in this episode, though. He's been... inconsistently plotted to move the plot along, but all and all he fared a lot better than Andrea or Rick did. The line to Milton when asked what his daughter would think of him, "She'd be afraid of me. But if I had been like this from the start, she'd be alive." And that sadistic choice for Milton is very chilling. He rounds up everyone, and both Tyreese and Sasha elected to stay behind -- and for a moment it seemed like the Governor was going to gun them down before giving them a gun.

The attack on the prison was anticlimactic, though seemingly by design. We get to see the Governor's people arm themselves up, before launching grenades that blew apart the two watchtowers in the prison. There's a lot of smashing, a lot of machine gun fire, as the Governor's army enters the seemingly abandoned prison. The episode is shot in a way that seems to imply that Rick's people are going to escape and try their luck elsewhere, with a long, extended shot of Carl packing his things at the beginning, but it's a trap. They scare the Woodbury army (which, by the way, is mostly made up of the rounded-up civilians instead of the Governor's normal goons, a huge majority of which died over the course of the season) away with zombies in the prison, prison alarms, and later on Maggie and Glenn wearing riot armour and going all crazy on the Woodbury army.

Great stuff from the prison crew, by the way, and even halfway through the episode when they had to clear some zombies for Strike Force Rick to hunt down the Governor, Carol and even fucking Beth get to stab zombies with a crowbar. We all know Carol's grown a backbone over the third season (remember season two Carol, who only exists to argue with the rest of the cast?) but Beth finally gets something to do! I honestly forget she existed half the time.

Anyway, back to the post-battle stuff. The Governor is forced to retreat, and he's pissed off at how nearly his entire army retreated. The Governor is absolutely pissed off as he confronts his people, all of whom just want to return to Woodbury... to which the Governor just machineguns the entire army down, to the shock of his lieutenants -- Martinez and this one black dude that's been a recurring extra just watch in shock as all this happened, and while it's a bit of a suspension of disbelief that no one bothered to either fire back or tackle the Governor, it's a suitably horrific moment. We don't see much of the Governor after this, so he just buggered off with Martinez and the black dude to... somewhere, I guess. The Governor's madness is clear, and he's just going to embrace his role to be a villain. He's survived to live another day, I guess.

Oh, and Allen, Tyreese's douchebag group-mate, tries to pull a gun on the Governor. He takes forever to do this and gets headshotted. That's one named character that died, unless any of the Woodbury people had names or personalities that I don't remember or care about. Allen's son, whose name I don't even remember, apparently died in a previous episode? I assume he's one of the casualties that were killed by Merle last episode. I don't care for Allen, though that's one plot thread that gets quickly cut off. 

One survivor, Karen, otherwise known as that one girl that Andrea talked to that one time early in the season, manages to meet up with the badass trio of Rick, Daryl and Michonne -- the three people setting out to murder the Governor and end this -- and everyone is suitably horrified to find out what the Governor did. It's fortunate Karen survived, because Karen managed to explain the situation to Tyreese and Sasha (both of whom are already second-guessing the Governor) and then the group ends up finding Andrea enough to help her shoot herself before she became the zombie.

One of the biggest problems with Tyreese is how he just seemed to just flit from one place to the next. I'm honestly surprised he and Sasha didn't just bugger out of Woodbury, and just why they decided to join the established-to-be-crazy Rick is a bit suspect. The episode ends with Rick bringing the remaining survivors in Woodbury to the prison, which is a bit of an odd move as contested by Carl, but the alternative is leaving these people who are established to be unable to fight to just stay in Woodbury without the ability to defend themselves.

Which means more cannon fodder for next season, I guess -- hopefully some of them become memorable and they don't just end up one-dimensional redshirts like Oscar and Axel. 

So yeah, a bit of a strange way to end the season. I do like how the situation isn't black and white, with Carl's argument having a huge amount of merit. After all, the boy that Carl shot did try to hand his gun over instead of dropping it, a trick that Carl himself had witnessed during the Shane/Rick confrontation in season two, so it's not as horrific a scene as it probably could've been. Still a bit of a cold-blooded move, but I like how this isn't black and white, and the alternative might cause Carl to end up in a situation similar to Andrea unable to bring herself to kill anyone.

It's... a very interesting way to end a season, which is more focused on building up possible plotlines in the fourth season more than anything. The assault on the prison could've stood to take a slightly longer run, and Andrea struggling with the pliers just isn't interesting at all, but eh, it could've been worse.

Overall, though, how was the season? Comparing it to the oft-maligned second season it's a definitive improvement, simply by the sheer fact that more things happen, and introducing two new settings with different groups of people make it work so much better when it's just the group in the farm just dealing with one or two problems (Carl getting shot, later Randall, and finally Shane). The fact that the Governor is a tangible threat throughout the third season also gives the show some focus beyond just 'survive from zombies', as well as the great comparisons between the prison and Woodbury, is ver well done. And for the most part, the plotlines that meander throughout the season generally work well -- the high emotional point is still the crisis caused by Andrew, and the intense sequence where two long-running members of the group die. The assault to rescue Glenn and Maggie was also very well-done, with several wild cards like Michonne and Merle in play. And the two focus episodes -- the one with Michonne, Rick and Carl, as well as last episode with Merle -- were very well done.

But it's still far from being great, because a lot of the same problems that I have with the second season still stands. A lot of the times our protagonists's actions, or rather, how they arrive at the conclusion that this is what they needed to do, is muddled. The Governor, Andrea and Rick all suffer greatly from this, and while it's easy to handwave the Governor's plot holes with 'he's a maniac' (though the show does vary very wildly on how coherent the dude is, because he ranges from being a psychotic madman to intelligent mastermind seemingly on a whim), Andrea and Rick don't get that much leeway, and the show's attempt to use Andrea as a bridge between the two settings failed pretty miserably.

But the scripting is somewhat better in this season, with Daryl, Carol, Maggie and Merle all significantly improved from their one-dimensional portrayals. Hershel is a bit of a problem and Carl's an enigma, but they don't annoy me as much as, say, season-two-Lori or season-two-Carol. Of course, there's also the fact that a lot of the newly introduced characters don't have much personality going on for them, making caring for them somewhat pointless (the two prisoners Oscar and Axel are prime examples, but also Tyreese and basically everyone in Woodbury except for Governor and Milton). But overall it's still an improvement, and considering this series still has at least five more seasons to go at the time of writing, I'd say that people liked it enough for it to have a chance to improve. We'll take a brief break from Walking Dead -- it's not the most popular series on the blog, after all, though I still kinda wanna do the rest of the episodes.