Previously, on The Walking Dead: “Arrow on the Doorpost“.

“Prey” opens with a flashback to Andrea and Michonne’s days together out in the wilderness of the Zombie Apocalypse. They’re sitting around a fire, eating something (something delicious, I’m sure) out of cans. Andrea, being her usual Andrea self, asks Michonne if she knew her walker dogs (you remember, the walkers Michonne kept on chains). Michonne side-eyes Andrea for asking but eventually answers that they “got what they deserved; they weren’t human to begin with”. Ooh, sounds like history.

We fade into the present time, and The Governor is working with some chains of his own; he’s putting together a bit of a torture chamber for Michonne, whom he plans to capture, remember. Outside, everyone in Woodbury is loading up all their weapons. Milton (John Ritter’s doppelganger) is questioning the need for so many weapons, while Andrea still naively thinks there’s some kind of deal in place.

Milton grows some balls and confronts The Governor (Phillip) about his vendetta against Rick, Michonne, and their group of goofy goobers. The Governor asks Milton if he still believes the biters/walkers have a “spark” of who they were; he does, and The Governor tells Milton that was his daughter. Milton advises him to move on, but The Governor is six kinds of bat shit, and there is no bringing “Phillip” back.

Milton brings Andrea to a room overlooking The Governor’s workshop, to show her what he’s up to. He suggests that she leave Woodbury and warn Rick’s group; she doesn’t want to do that. She gets all dead behind the eyes and pulls her gun to shoot The Governor. Milton stops her, for what-the-fuck-ever reason. When they’re where they can talk, Andrea suggests that she should go warn Rick (as if Milton hadn’t just suggested that). She also thinks Milton should come with her, which is actually a good idea, but Milton doesn’t want to go… mainly because he dislikes a change of scenery; he “doesn’t know” anyone at the prison. It’s like he’s changing middle schools.

Outside, again, Andrea is stopped by Martinez who demands she give him her gun and any ammo she has (he’s collecting it for their peaceful meeting with assault on Rick). She reluctantly turns over her gun but tells Martinez he’ll have to frisk her to see if she has a knife; he doesn’t, because nobody wants to touch Andrea. She makes her way over to a wall where Sasha is making fun of Tyreese’s inability to aim a gun. After ineffectively trying to convince the two of them to leave their post, she just says “fuck it” and leaves right in front of them, but not before, ironically, trying to warn them about how ass-backwards insane The Governor is. I suppose Tyreese could have shot her in the back as she ran off, but he probably wouldn’t have hit her anyway.

Tyreese and Sasha tell The Governor about Andrea leaving, and Tyreese basically grovels at The Governor’s feet; it’s not because he’s a pussy, though. It’s because he’s smart. He knows not to cross The Governor’s one-eyed crazy ass. Tyreese does, however, let Allen know about what Andrea said. Allen is the white guy in Tyreese’s group, and he doesn’t like Tyreese. We learn the reason: Tyreese “shamed” Allen in front of Ben, his son. How did he do this? Tyreese once saved the life of Donna, Allen’s wife. Allen also tells Tyreese not to start trouble with the Woodbury guys because they’ve been attacked by a “cowboy and a crazy lady with sword”. Allen is kind of a dickhole.

The Governor finds out that Milton knew Andrea was going to leave and that he told Andrea about the “Michonne deal”. The Governor tears off in his truck to track Andrea by himself. Andrea, running right down the middle of the street, hears the truck coming, so she hides off in the woods as The Governor speeds by. We learned in “Clear” just what happens to hitchhikers in the Zombie Apocalypse. While hiding, Andrea gets snuck up on by a handful of walkers, which leads to the most bullshit scene ever shown on this show. Andrea is tough, but she’s not tough enough to take on three walkers, by herself, and armed with nothing but a small knife (even Rick needed Daryl to intervene in a similar situation). However, she not only fights them off, but she’s completely steely-eyed about it.

Back at Woodbury, Martinez has taken Tyreese’s group out to a pit full of walkers (surrounded by trailers full of walkers). Tyreese realizes that the pit/trailers are going to be used on the prison group, and he is not about that life. He refuses to support feeding women and children to the walkers (I guess he’s cool with throwing men in there). That’s when Martinez threatens Tyreese’s group with being thrown out of Woodbury; Allen swells up for a moment and jumps Tyreese. Tyreese, being the clearly stronger guy, easily overtakes Allen while also shoving off Ben. Tyreese holds Allen over the edge of the pit, and Allen tells him to go ahead and drop him. Tyreese doesn’t, though (I guess he’s not so cool with throwing men in there).

On in the open plains, Andrea is still running, and she manages to run right out in the middle of a huge field. The Governor drives by, she lays down, but he saw her… because she’s the only person in a big-ass field. He drives after her, and she Forrest Gumps it away from the bumper of his truck and into the nearby woods. No shit! She keeps running out in the open, until she’s seen, and then she runs for cover in the woods. Anyone but Andrea would realize it’s probably to good idea to just stay in the damn woods.

She runs all the way to the barn where they’ll be meeting, and The Governor is hot on her heels… because I guess he knew she would go there? Inside, the two of them play a gruesome game of whistling, one-eyed cat and stupid mouse amongst a group of walkers that they nonchalantly kill while skulking around each other in this warehouse. Eventually, Andrea opens the wrong door, but there is no year’s supply of tuna fish on the other side; it’s a roomful of zombies. She quickly closes the door and is face-to-face with The Governor. He tells her it’s “time to come home”, but she just opens the door and walks behind it, allowing the walkers to come through and allow her to escape. The Governor John Wayne’s his way through a handful of them, but then we cut to Andrea walking out like she isn’t even in a hurry, and all we get of The Governor are the sounds of him still fighting. Did he make it? Clearly, Andrea thinks not. Andrea is never right about anything. She goes skipping along, continuing on her merry way toward the prison.

Over at the pit from hell, someone pulls up, sets the place on fire, and then leaves. Was it Tyreese? Do you think it was Tyreese? You’re supposed to think it was Tyreese. The pit walkers/biters are all burning, which is a gruesome sight, but it’s not nearly as genuinely creepy as the sight when the burned walkers/biters are found in the morning… all crispy and still writhing around on the ground, hungry for brains. It’s jarring.

Andrea finally reaches the prison; well, she can see it, and she starts crying. As if they’re going to be perfectly fine with her showing up. Just as Rick sees her out of the corner of his eye, The Governor tackles her and holds her down; Rick probably thought he was just seeing Lori again… stuff… things. The Governor gets back to Woodbury but denies having found Andrea; did he kill her? Before we have a chance to question his actions, he has to deal with the burned pit walkers/biters. He talks to Tyreese about it; Tyreese questions the use of the pit/trailers on the children in the prison group, but The Governor lies assures them all that the trailers will not actually be used. He says they are just a scare tactic. Everyone buys this. As he walks out of the room, The Governor asks Tyreese where he got the gas, but Tyreese doesn’t know what the fuck gas he’s talking about because Tyreese didn’t burn anything. It was Milton. We know it was Milton; The Governor knows it was Milton, too, but he doesn’t confront Milton with this knowledge. You know why? Because Milton is going to get the shit killed out of him later.

The episode ends with a revelation that I dare say took absolutely nobody by surprise: The Governor did not kill Andrea; he has snuck her into his “workshop” where she is now tied up.

Review: This episode was one of the quickest hours of the series; it just flew by because there was almost not a single lull in the action. If there were no commercials, it would have felt five minutes long, and I mean that in a positive way. It’s interesting to see the setup The Governor has for his workshop/torture chamber; as you can see in the picture above, he has two chains connected to two metal poles, and it looks as if he plans to chain someone between the poles, a la the myth of Samson. That could be important symbolism, if you’re familiar with the death of Samson and how he sacrificed himself to kill the Philistines, or it could just be that they want to use that setup because it looks cool. We’ll see. We learned some more about Tyreese and his group, too, which is nice, and it’s good to finally have the character of Milton develop beyond the level of a poor man’s Waylon Smithers. All-in-all, this episode was a lot of filler leading up to the big “war”, but we did get a bit of a taste of what to expect from The Governor, with his pit. The season is winding down; just two episodes to go.

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