‘The Walking Dead’ 3.06 Recap: “We Having Fun Yet?”

Can we all agree that Michonne’s “biter-gram” was the coolest and cleverest thing that has ever happened in ‘The Walking Dead’? The girl has some serious issues, but they sure make for some great fight scenes. She reminds me what the zombie apocalypse could be like if Beatrix Kiddo lived in it.

The show is really starting to pile on the plot now. The scope is widening exponentially. Instead of surviving the zombie plague on a personal level, we’ve now grown larger than the boundaries of the group or the farm. With outside forces, Rick and his group are sure to face even more dangerous threats than just the flesh-eating undead.

The Governor, with his newly-bedded Andrea, brims with confidence. Once he finds out that the Atlanta group is holed up in the prison, all hell will break loose. We’ll finally get to have our brother-on-brother showdown then. These past two episodes have definitely foreshadowed a Daryl versus Merle battle royale. This week’s episode even goes so far as to give Daryl a backstory about his mother accidentally burning herself alive while smoking in bed. That’s followed up by Daryl carrying a battered and bruised Carol to safety. Juxtapose that with Merle’s incessant need to kill and maim, and you’ve got the makings of a hellish family reunion.

Rick is losing it. I was informed by readers of the comic that Rick’s conversation on the phone was indeed with Lori. Even though the show tried to disguise that as long as possible, the episode eventually reveals that the voices on the other end are simply projections of Rick’s weary mind. Hopefully, the phantom phone call has put Rick back on the right track. He finally holds his baby, so that’s a good start.

There are some nice touches in this episode, events that will stick in my mind as highlights of the season. Michonne takes on a group of living, breathing gun-toters, and slices off heads like she’s taking out the Crazy 88s. However, my favorite has to be a subtle little jab at the way things used to be. As Michonne crouches behind a car and watches Glenn and Maggie get abducted by Merle, we can see one of those stickers that people put on the back of their cars to indicate how many children are in their family. That deliberately placed sticker is such a great little wink. How frivolous we all were back in the time where stickers on our cars seemed important. Now, it’d be much more accurate if a few of those stick-on stick figures had some bites taken out of them. How times have changed.

This episode may be one of the show’s strongest, but it walks that fine line that ‘Lost’ struggled with for all those seasons. How do you tell intimately personal stories of survival, but still leave the show cliffhanger-y for the masses? Sometimes ‘Lost’ was able to achieve that perfectly, mixing the island’s mythology with intricate backstories full of emotion and purpose. Will ‘The Walking Dead’ be able to do the same thing? You don’t want to lose the emotional edge that you’ve tried so hard to build up in the first two seasons, yet the show has to progress, stakes have to be raised, and the plot has to broaden in order to keep people interested. This season feels like it’s headed in the right direction, but if we learned anything from Season 2, it’s that something as simple as a farm could derail the whole train.

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