'Holy shit!!'- The Walking Dead

Holy shit indeed season 3 of the Walking Dead has come back to our televisions in both the UK and the USA through the beauty of FX. AMC’s hit TV show based on comics written by Robert Kirkman has been a huge success and one of my favourite programmes, as well as graphic novels. The series starts with an intense opening as the group are trying to find a safe house to stay at, of course this is not so easy with an ongoing pursuit from zombies. The opening scenes of the new series are intense to say the least, none of the characters speak for the first 10 minutes, there is just a lot of killing and suspense music; from the start I was on edge. This suspense was held throughout the episode, I was on the edge of my seat with my hands covering my eyes waiting for the impending doom to sweep over the characters and for all of them to die (which of course doesn’t happen).

The episode see’s Rick find a prison, where all the inmates are zombies. The first task is for the group to get into the yard and make it safe to stay in, I must emphasise this episode contains a lot of over kill, and is not for the squeamish. As well as the zombie slaughtering there is also a lot of tension within the group itself, particularly between Rick and his pregnant wife Lori. I have to say I am not super keen on the relationships between the characters, particularly these two as there always seems to be an extra bit of added drama, which in my opinion is unnecessary and not key to the zombie storyline. As the episode progresses and the team explore further into the prison the tension builds even further, the music builds up and each turn of the corner gradually gets more and more traumatic, until inevitably we find the zombies. But for me this wasn’t the shock, of course in a zombie programme the characters will run into zombies, the shock came from bumping into other living prisoners! Hershel loses his leg after being bitten by a zombie (obviously the only answer is for Rick to cut it off with an axe!) and as he’s bleeding out on the floor, the camera pans to several dark shadows, who I assumed to be more zombies, but no its living prisoners. The episode ends on one of the prisoners saying ‘Holy shit’ and that’s how I felt at the end of the episode…Holy shit!!