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Holy crap.

After last week’s flop, I was really expecting them to ramp up the tension in order to get the ball rolling again, and they nailed it!

This week’s episode was pretty darn good, and I’ve got to say that I’m very interested in seeing where they are going to take some of the character storylines next. The cast of Season 3 is pretty large, and due to this there is a lot of stuff going on at once; with the Cyclops-Governor’s crew, The Ricktatorship, Tyreese’s goup, and the random group of people we encountered this episode–which seemed like a bit of action filler for me, but what do I know. Although, I can’t judge too harshly on the point of the scene, because Daryl killing a zombie with a trunk lid was pretty epic, and it goes in history as one of my favourite zombie kills of all time–the gore for that scene was awesome, it was like they filled a melon with rancid hamburger, excellent.

When things start to slow down a bit, we get to know Axel–a fair haired Yosemite Sam–a bit more when he starts talking with Carol more. It was kind of nice to see that they tried to draw away from the Ricktatorship seeing dead people, and not the usually kind.

However, I can’t say that I didn’t pretty much see the death of Axel coming. The writers for the show seem to have a formula for which character is going to die in an episode. Their formula: make the character as likeable as possible and give him loads more screen-time than usual in the same episode where they are going to bite the dust, or in this case, be left as a brain-smear on Carol’s face. This happened with Dale, way back in Season 2. During their conversations about whether or not to kill their prisoner, Dale come out as the voice of reason, advocating the humanity that hangs in the balance with their decision, and it is here we see Dale a lot in that episode. The BAM. Zombie Chow.

Another example would be T-Dog from this season. On the episode that he died, he was the one who tried to talk the others out of releasing the convicts from the prison, being the voice of reason, that sounds familiar. And as heroic as he was, BAM. Zombie
So, it was pretty easy to see that when we started seeing Axel more that he was going to…BAM
Uhmmm, Carol, you have a little something there on your…nevermind.

We also see the return of the Dixon boys! Daryl and Merle come to save the day when the big bad Governor comes in with his Woodbury clan and shoots up the place. For 5 minutes, it’s the gunfight at the OK Corral until the Governor randomly leaves, which seemed to me like a bit of a waste. He had a good surprise attack, if he followed up correctly, he could have killed everybody in the prison. I mean, he did take out an entire troop of soldiers in mere seconds prior in the season, oh well, maybe I’m just nitpicking.

Rick shakes off his crazy-stupor and joins in the enfilade, where he runs out of bullets and gets swarmed by a trio of zombies pinning him against the fence. Then Merle comes in and saves the day! Wait, what? Merle? Yeah, Merle and Daryl come and save Rick. It seems like the direction their going is to have Merle join Rick’s group, but have him do a lot of things to prove himself to the group, because afterall, he did beat the heck out of Glen and nearly killed Michonne.
Overall, this was a pretty damn good episode because it got the tension and suspense rolling again! I expect to see a huge series of gun battles in the next few episodes, because this conflict cannot be resolved in merely one episode, which I hope they don’t save it all for the final episode.

They let me down last week, but this week made up for it, and then some.

RIP Axel, I think everybody misses you more than Lori.