The Walking Dead - S3E16 - Welcome to the Tombs
This season’s finale opens on The Governor’s eye; as the camera zooms out, he punches “you”—the camera is in first-person—and you’re supposed to think he’s beating Andrea, whom he captured in the previous episode. However, it’s not Andrea! It’s Milton! The Governor has him tied to a chair and is beating him for burning the captive walkers The Governor had planned to use on our pals Rick and his ragtag prison gang.
What did happen to Andrea, though? Well, Milton wants to know, too; he asks The Governor if he killed her, and that’s when Milton is taken to The Governor’s playroom where she is being held. The Governor has Milton remove the tools from the room; as he’s doing this, Milton drops the tools because he’s all kinds of beaten and/or scared shitless. He picks them up and carries them out of the room, and that’s when The Governor grabs a knife and tells Milton that, one way or another, he’s not leaving the room without killing Andrea. Milton takes the knife, starts toward Andrea, but then turns to attack The Governor. Since The Governor is at least 19 times stronger than Milton, Milton fails; The Governor takes the knife and stabs it into Milton’s gut. Now, he tells Milton that he will kill Andrea, but now it will be as a walker/biter. The Governor has really mastered using zombies as weapons—well, almost mastered. He leaves Milton with one of the best lines of the series: In this life, you kill or you die… or you die and then you kill…
Meanwhile, back at sleepaway camp—err, I mean, the prison, Ricky Rick and his funky bunch are preparing to flee the prison; we see this through the eyes of a moping Carl who is clearly none-too-happy about leaving. He doesn’t like Rick’s decisions. Then we see Daryl for the first time since he tearfully killed Merle, and he’s consoled by Carol. Everyone seems to want those two to bump uglies, but I just think that would be uncomfortable. Rick and Michonne keep flirting with each other, too, but it’s less weird when they do it. Michonne thanks Rick for accepting her, and Rick tells her it was really Carl who convinced him to keep her around. See, Carl? Your dad really does listen to you… sometimes! (way more than you listen to him, that’s for sure.)
The Governor and his Woodbury militia are preparing to roll out and go pop some caps when Tyreese speaks up and tells The Governor that he and his sister Sasha won’t be joining the army in their storm on Normandy; they’ll stay behind and guard the children. That’s when you just know Tyreese was going to be shot right in the face for backsassing The Gov’, but nope. The Governor just hands him a gun and says “Thank you.” Apparently, The Governor didn’t see when Tyreese was taking target practice and couldn’t hit shit.
The Goofy Goobers, or whatever you want to call The Gov’ and his ill-equipped militia, go into the prison with guns blazing. They blow up a watchtower, they bust through the gates, they pee in the water fountain; you know, generally messing things about. The only problem? As we know, the gang split. All this noise is for naught. The Governor is visibly disappointed; as he’s milling about, he comes across a bible with John 5:29 highlighted: “And shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life, and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation.” This pisses The Gov’ off; clearly he hates highlighters. The group splits up, which is always a good idea, and The Governor leads half of them down a dark corridor.
Back at the torture dungeon, Milton is still alive—because people only ever die quickly when they don’t have anything to say—and he informs Andrea that he left some pliers behind her to help her free herself. She tries to tell him he’s going to be okay, but he’s not trying to hear that bullshit; he knows he’s a goner, and she really needs to hurry so she can find something sharp to jam into his head.
In the prison, the small town soldiers still think they’re some kind of SWAT team searching for Rick.
Meanwhile, Tyreese and Sasha, in-between babysitting duties, are starting to wonder what is going to happen once The Governor returns, and they don’t have any kind of answer.
Andrea still hasn’t gotten those damn pliers. They’re right there, yet she just can’t seem to reach them… because she’s Andrea, and of course she can’t do anything right. Then, for some reason, she and Milton decide to strike up a conversation… you know, because they’re not under any kind of time crunch or anything. He asks her why she stayed; she admits she wanted to “save” everyone. Then he finally reminds her that she needs to hurry the hell up—because he’s going to be a zombie soon!
At the prison, The Gov’ finally finds something: a trap! Where was Admiral Ackbar when he really needed him? The Governor tries to tell his “men” to stand their ground, but they’re not trained soldiers (as if he is) so they all scramble. It turns out that some of the gang (Rick, Glenn, Maggie, etc.) stayed behind in the prison to drive The Governor out, while Carl, Hershel, etc. hid in the woods. This is really why Carl was angry, earlier; he wants to be there fighting. That’s when one of The Governor’s men goes running through the woods and comes upon Carl; the teenager seems to be handing over his gun, but Carl decides to shoot him in the face, anyway. The look on Hershel’s face is pure shock. Hershel didn’t know Carl was about that life.
They managed to kick The Governor and his men out of the prison yard, but they’re going to go after them. Carl, of course, wants to go; he tells Rick about gunning down the teenager, but Hershel keys Rick in on what really happened.
Out on the road, one truck is hightailing its way back to Woodbury, but the other truck (the one carrying The Governor) runs that one off the road to get it to stop. Everyone gets out and starts yammering back-and-forth at each other: “We have to go back!”, “They can keep the prison!”, “I don’t even like chicken nuggets!”, you know the expected things. As this is getting louder and louder, The Governor is getting more and more pissed; as he gets more and more pissed, The Gov’ gets crazier and crazier. Eventually, he snaps and just starts Al Capon’ing everyone; Allen has a machine gun pointed at The Governor’s face, but The Gov’ still manages to shoot him, because Allen ain’t shit. The Governor kills all of them except Martinez, another guy, and Karen, who hides herself beneath a dead body. The Gov’ gets back in his truck with Martinez and the other guy, and they speed off.
Now with her shoes off, Andrea still—STILL—doesn’t have those damn pliers. She finally gets them wedged between her surprisingly pedicured toes and brings them to her hands to begin trying to maybe think about possibly escaping.
Back at the prison, Rick decides to have an ill-timed heart-to-heart with Carl and confront him about how he shot the teenager. Carl proceeds to basically hand Rick his ass when he throws all of Rick’s mistakes back in his face about all the people he’s let go who have, in-turn, come back to kill someone. Carl says, “I did what I had to do.” and tells Rick to get out there and kill The Gov’ before he can come back to kill anyone else.
Rick, Daryl, and Michonne go after The Gov’—and Daryl is, of course, on his motorcycle because sometimes the most important thing is to be a badass—while Glenn and Maggie stay behind to guard the prison. The three searchers come upon the destruction The Governor left in his path—all the dead bodies of his militia—and they find Karen there.
Elsewhere, guess what? Andrea? Yeah, the one in the chair; she still hasn’t gotten loose. I’m beginning to think she doesn’t want to be free. But now Milton has died and turned, so—of course—she somehow manages to quickly get free and… we listen to their struggle from the other side of the door. What happened on the other side of the door?
Meanwhile, Rick, Daryl, Michonne (and now Karen) sneak up to the walls of Woodbury and, as one would expect, Tyreese shoots at them. Also as one would expect, Tyreese misses. Karen yells to Tyreese that it’s her, and she tells Tyreese what The Governor did. Obviously, since Tyreese is sensible, he listens to Rick’s reasoning and believes him. Rick wants to know if Andrea is there, for who knows why. They all go looking for her, and they find the room with blood leaking out under the door. When they open it, we see Milton’s dead body laying by the chair, and now Andrea is sitting by the door, where Milton had been… and she’s been bitten. They all share a few words, Andrea says “I tried” (referring to how she thought she was somehow more important than she really was), and then she wants to kill herself before she turns, Rick gives her a gun and steps outside, but Michonne won’t leave Andrea’s side (Michonne is great). The camera pulls away, back on the other side of the door with Rick, and we hear a gunshot. Andrea is finally gone.
The show ends with Rick busing Woodbury’s remaining citizens (old people and children) into the prison. Carl is like, “What is this? Don’t you remember the talk we just had?” Rick ignores him because shit may have gotten a little crazy for a bit, and Rick may be a little softer, but do not forget that this is still a Ricktatorship, bitch.
At the end of the day, it wasn’t the best episode of the season (that honor goes to “Clear”), but it was a pretty good finale for season 3 of The Walking Dead. Really, all season, it felt like the showrunners thought the audience liked Andrea far more than the audience actually did like her, so they probably felt like her dying would pack more of an emotional punch than it did. The best moment of the show, even though it’s probably a bit morbid to say, was when The Governor finally showed his full-crazy and just laid waste to his militia. The storyline between Rick and Carl looms heavy over the expectations for next season, too. Could Carl potentially “run away” and maybe join The Governor next season? That would be intense. We can’t wait for October to get here!
What did you think of the finale?
