The Waiver Wire

Throughout the third season of The Walking Dead, several of our writers will be on a weekly rotation giving their thoughts of the most recent episode. As always, be aware of spoilers.

To read previous episodes recaps, make sure to jump over to our Pop Culture page.

Unlike the other writers that will be covering The Walking Dead this season, my experience with the show is completely different. I didn’t watch a single episode until the first season was put on Netflix in full about 8 months ago. Those first six episodes of the show completely dragged me into the series and I finally understood why so many people had become such big fans of the show.

However, my television viewing habits are inconsistent, at best. Rarely do I ever stay on top of following a show when it is airing for the first time, so I rely on Netflix or random internet sites to get all caught up at the same time (this also happened with Game of Thrones, which was so addicting I accidentally pulled two consecutive all-nighters). Once season two made its appearance on Netflix this summer, I made a concerted effort to bang it out before the new season started so I can keep track with everyone else.

Having all of the episodes at one time turned out to be a bit of a blessing and a curse. The good news was that I easily cruised through the last season and am all caught up on everything going on. The bad news, and I know I’ve talked about this with our other staff writers here, is that I’ve become very tired of the characters on the show. There isn’t one main storyline that has really grabbed my attention and forces me to watch the show on a nightly basis. Instead, I find myself watching the show not because I feel the need to, but because everybody else is watching it, too.

That’s why I was actually a bit more excited about this week’s episode. We were given a break from the regular group led by Rick, and given a glimpse into what on the surface looked like a small utopia in an otherwise unstable world. Andrea and Michonne came across the recent crash site of an army helicopter, where they encountered The Governor, and a familiar face in Meryl. The two get taken into Woodbury, which is merely a heavily fortified outpost where people are doing their best to get on with their lives post-outbreak.

In the beginning, I was completely intrigued by this new situation we’ve come across. Desperately, I think we all needed a break from Rick’s group because we were running low on new interests that didn’t involve a potential zombie baby, Herschel’s new peg leg, Carol performing c-sections on dead walkers, whatever Maggie and Glenn do in their spare time and Daryl being Daryl. Stumbling into Woodbury seemed like the perfect way to introduce new characters to the story and learn more of their story. Besides the Colonel and Meryl, the seemingly other big player the town has seems to be the mysterious doctor figure that dissects all of the dead bodies when they’re brought behind the wall.

After a couple of minutes, though, I found myself once again getting a bit bored with the whole environment, and found the new characters to be just as predictable as the old. Everybody and their mother knew there had to be some evil in The Governor, otherwise he wouldn’t be able to control a new civilization of 70+ people. Did we expect him to go firing squad on the small army that was waiting for the helicopter to return from the scouting mission? No. But we knew there was a certain level of evil that allowed this man to command. That seems to be the running theme from every group we’ve met thus far in this postapocalyptic world. Rick has some evil, Shane definitely had some evil, and now The Governor follows suit. Why else would Meryl be so quick to buddy up with him, when back in season one, he was ready to rock the boat as often as possible?

Maybe it was just the die-hard, fantasy football match-up on the line Saints/Broncos game that had me wanting to change the channel so desperately while watching The Walking Dead this week. But, I think it’s something much more than that. I think the show is losing some of that initial juice that made it so popular. The only overarching question that really stands out from last week is what is it that The Governor wants from Andrea and Michonne? Why spare their lives and not the lives of U.S. soldiers? There must be something to it, and clearly we don’t know what it is yet.

Even with that said, it’s not a question I’m dying to have answered. Maybe I’m just in Dead overload with the amount I’ve watched in a relatively short period of time. Or, maybe the show is losing its thunder.

You be the judge.