‘Don’t let the World spoil you’ – Lori (The Walking Dead)

If I could pick one word to sum up episode 4 of season 3 of The Walking Dead I would chose traumatic; because for me the entire episode had me on edge. This episode combined both the group in the prison, and the group in the town…it focused predominantly on emotions, however still contained a fair amount of zombie action. It was the second half of this episode that particularly got to me; the first half I guess was meant to be a little sentimental, showing that the world can still be a safe place. Inevitably though the zombies come and the World goes to shit again, but we as the audience are warned of this impending doom in the opening scenes of this episode (where we see an unknown person open the gates and welcome the zombies in). It is an attempt to keep the audience on edge, which if I’m honest I didn’t find particularly shocking…after all watching The Walking Dead we know that eventually the zombies will ruin it. So it’s the second half of the episode that we see the zombies over-run the prison, and suddenly no-one is safe and the group scatter. It is during this separation that we see Lori say the lines from the title of this piece, she has gone into labour and it’s all gone wrong. She is aware of her impending death and offers words of advice to her son…just before she is sliced up and shot (this is not recommended for those of you who are squeamish, I was gagging at this point). Whilst the divide has happened all the characters are in danger and some get killed, eaten and go missing- this is an interesting set up for which I will be interested to see how the characters develop after this crisis. I enjoyed this episode however, after the last episode with the focus on the town I expected to see more action from both sets of stories. Even though this episode did show the town and the Governor, it wasn’t particularly memorable, as once again the focus is back on to Rick and the prison…this was a little disappointing to me as I would like to see the focus to be on both stories rather than predominantly focussing on one or the other.