Walking Dead Discussion Thread: S3 E14, “Prey”

Spoiler Alert: Do not read this post or the comment section if you have not seen the show. Also, for those who have read the comics, please do not discuss plot elements not revealed on the show.

Guest post by Pub Editor

This week’s episode focused almost entirely on Andrea and the Governor. And Andrea finally makes a decision and takes action.

Hearing that the Governor is a dangerous psychopath is one thing. Seeing the evidence is another. It seems that Andrea had to see the Governor’s torture chamber with her own eyes before she would believe what several people had been telling her for several episodes. The scales fall from her eyes. She has another opportunity to kill the Governor, which she does not take (this time, in part because Milton stops her). As Milton advises, she runs.

(Andrea does not wait until evening, when she might have been able to sneak away under cover of darkness and would likely have had hours before the Governor noticed she was missing; but perhaps she worried that the woods would have been more dangerous at night, or that waiting would have prevented her from warning Rick and the prison people in time.)

As Andrea is leaving Woodberry, Martinez takes her sidearm. (Insert a Second Amendment confiscation joke here.) She also speaks briefly with the Governor, who strangely does not notice the nervous aspect in Andrea’s voice and posture. I thought that the Governor usually had a better read on people than he demonstrated there.

Andrea makes for the prison, and the Governor (alone) pursues. Andrea hies in an abandoned slaughterhouse, where she manages to knock over the loudest tools and parts, and the Governor follows here into the dark building. I have to say that I really liked the slaughterhouse scene. It was some of the tensest action we’ve seen in the past two seasons. The Governor whistling as he walks though the slaughterhouse looking for Andrea was the creepiest moment of the episode. We’ve talked before about how the main characters seem to have become rather blase in their attitudes toward the walkers; the ambulatory carnivorous dead do not inspire the same terror that they did in season 1. So the tension of the Governor searching for Andrea in a darkened slaughterhouse was refreshing.

We did get a herd scene, and Andrea tactically directs the herd of walkers on the Governor to make her escape. The Governor successfully and fights off the herd by himself (in a battle that we largely do not get to see). Poignantly, Andrea comes within sight of the prison before the Governor catches her. Twice within the space of a few minutes, the audience was uncertain about whether a character had survived (the Governor confronting the herd in the slaughterhouse, and Andrea after the Governor captures her outside the prison).

In the secondary story, the writers are continuing to drive a wedge between Tyreese and Sasha on the one hand and the other two members of their group (whose names I cannot remember but do not seem important). Tyreese is uncomfortable with capturing biters in the pit and using them as weapons; part of me hoped against hope that he would say, “The game ain’t in me no more.” Later, someone (presumably Milton) pours gasoline on the captured walkers and sets them on fire. When one of the Woodberry folks checks the smoldering pit the next day, some of the burned walkers are still…alive (or active or whatever we want to call that condition). (Question: do walkers feel pain? I would imagine that being burned like they were is intensely painful, but it’s not clear what the walkers feel. We saw in the CDC that only certain parts of the brain are reactivated by the walker infection.)

Is it clear to everyone that the Governor is going to kill Milton for the BBQ at the pit? Why is that fact not clear to Milton?

Overall, a good episode. Creepy.

We did get one flashback scene, from the time when Michonne and Andrea were alone together on the road. Andrea tries to plumb the depths that are Michonne and to get her companion to open up a little. This attempt is about as successful as we would expect.

Also, the Governor uses far more shovel action than was necessary to dispatch a walker in the slaughterhouse. Read into that what you will.

Finally, I think that the writers are setting the groundwork for Tyreese being the one to kill the Governor.

*Note from Mike Dwyer: I am still looking for one more guest poster for next week. If interested, please leave a comment or email me at progress.conservative*at*gmail*dot*com.