Welcome to Walking Dead Weekly! As the title implies, each week (bearing a new episode of course), we’ll be taking a look at the latest episode of the AMC series. I’ll let you know how I felt about each weekly offering, and will also compare it to what Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard were doing with the comic at the same time.

Last week we saw Rick deal with the death of his beloved (though not lately) Lori: he did what anyone would do in that situation and went INSANE. Rick spent the episode chopping up walkers, kicking Glenn’s ass, and having about as many lines as T-Dog on a good day. We also learned that even in this world, babies need to eat! Luckily enough, formula is apparently in abundance as Maggie and Daryl didn’t have to look very hard to find it. Things got way more interesting in Woodbury, as Michonne decided to leave (though Andrea chose the opposite), and we saw a sickeningly sweet side to Governor Phillip. The episode closed with a serious “what the?” moment, as Rick heard a phone ring for the first time since he woke up in this hell.

You know the drill. There are spoilers below, so don’t read until you’ve watched! Let’s jump right into Hounded.

Episode Thoughts – ‘Hounded’

I hate Merle. I just hate him. I hated him as the racist, ignorant asshole in season one, and I hated him the moment I saw his face again in the current season. I was relieved that Rick locked him up on that roof, as I never wanted to see his annoying face again. Of course, that isn’t the way things would work out.

Does everyone else love this guy? Am I just crazy? He rubs me the wrong way, and I seem to have a really hard time enjoying any moment he’s in. I didn’t love Hounded, and I’m not really sure if it’s because it wasn’t as strong an episode as we’ve been getting, or because Merle falls front and center for a lot of it.

Hounded opens with Merle and his team on the hunt for Michonne, who left the community after learning a little too much about it. Michonne has spent most of the zombie apocalypse alone, so she proves to be a very formidable opponent. She ends the interaction severely injured, but alive, as Merle returns to the Governor (minus the rest of his group) to tell him that she’s dead. This whole sequence is split throughout the course of the episode, and is just nowhere near as intriguing as anything else that’s going on. The only real interesting thing here is that Michonne learns that walkers are attracted by smell, so after being covered in undead guts they simply pass right by her. We of course already knew this, as we saw it way back in season one.

Remember that CRAZY moment at the end of Say the Word when a freaking phone started ringing? We return to the prison just seconds after the end of the last episode, just in time to hear what pans out. The woman on the other end is apparently from another, safer group of survivors. After what just happened with Rick’s gang, he of course wants to join up, but the woman isn’t quite ready to trust him yet. She promises to call again in just a few hours, as Rick begs her to reconsider.

Rick very briefly meets with the rest of the group to learn what they’ve been up to: everyone’s running low on ammo, Axel is trying to fix the generator, Carl’s okay (yeah right), and Maggie and Glenn are set to make a supply run later that day. Satisfied, Rick returns to whatever the hell he’s been doing since Lori died.

Back at Woodbury, Andrea decides she should earn her keep if she’ll be staying in the town. She asks to be put on the wall to keep her skills up, and just moments after starting her first shift she breaks the rules, jumps over, and knifes a walker up close. Then, after even more innuendo than usual between her and Governor Phil, the pair finally decide that it’s time to hit the sheets. I think this must have been the most drawn out hookup ever seen on television, but it will be awesome to see how she reacts when she learns who the Governor really is.

Rick receives another call, this time from a male that sounds strangely similar to Dale. The two go back and forth before coming to the touchy subject of Lori’s death. When Rick won’t share how she passed, the man hangs up, and Rick understandably flips out. He receives another call shortly afterwards and things begin to get even weirder: he never mentioned his name, yet the woman ends up calling him by it. What the hell?

Carl, Oscar, and Daryl decide to head deeper into the cell block to clear out any stragglers. Here we get a touching interaction between Carl and Daryl, who share the tale of their mother’s deaths, and genuinely look to bond before the conversation is through.

Hounded is over half finished before things get really interesting. Maggie and Glenn stop on their supply run, and who else but Merle comes across them (small world huh). He starts off cheery, seemingly glad to see his old “friend” Glenn. Merle of course asks the status of his brother, and freaks out when Glenn tells him that Daryl is alive, but won’t reveal his whereabouts.

Merle takes the pair hostage and brings them back to Woodbury. He tells the Governor that they look like they’re doing pretty well for themselves. SHIT.

Does anyone remember Carol? The group spent about 100 episodes looking for her lost daughter in season two, but when she disappears amidst all the shit in Killer Within, nobody says a freaking word, let alone tries to find her. That being said, in Hounded Daryl finds her, holed up and hungry after being missing for days. It’s fitting that Daryl is the one to finally locate Carol (still alive), as after everyone had given up hope on Sophia, he didn’t and continued hunting for clues (though admittedly, for much too long).

Rick receives another call, and here we get another big reveal: he’s just crazy. The phone didn’t ring, there’s nobody on the other end. He’s been talking to dead people for the whole episode. While I thought this was an amazing twist in the comics, because the phone is introduced and concluded so quickly here, I feel it didn’t really have the same effect. Once Rick realizes that he’s crazy however, the crazy seems to go away. He finally heads back to the group and holds his new, nameless baby for the first time.

This touching moment doesn’t last long however. As the group heads outside, Rick sees something way off in the distance. He heads down to the walker infested fence, where he lays his eyes on Michonne for the first time. Six episodes in, we get our first bridge between the prison and Woodbury.

I feel as though Hounded was likely the weak point in season 3 so far (though the weak point of something as awesome as The Walking Dead has been lately, is still pretty damn good). It was necessary in order to set things in motion (Michonne FINALLY at the prison, Glenn and Maggie headed to Woodbury), but much of the episode felt like filler to me. While I liked the telephone in the comic, the whole thing came and went too quickly to be really effective here, and Merle hunting Michonne for such a large chunk of the episode felt largely unnecessary. Don’t get me started on Carol. If there’s been one poor choice made in crafting the story for season three, it’s the fact that she was simply forgotten (and once she finally was remembered, the situation concluded almost instantaneously). I loved how remorseful Daryl appeared after finding her knife, I just wish that someone had cared at least enough to mention her before this scene.

The season has been pretty phenomenal so far, so I can’t really complain about anything I may not have loved here. Of course we were also treated to a sneak peek of next week’s offering, so be sure to check out the trailer for episode seven, When the Dead Come Knocking. I can’t wait to see what happens now that Woodbury and the prison gang will know of each others existence.

Of course, let us know what you thought of the episode below!

Comic Comparison

Shit’s getting pretty different, both for better and for worse!

On the awesome side: Woodbury. We’re getting much deeper into the community than we ever did in the comic. The place is interesting as hell, and its leader, Phillip ‘Governor’ Blake is wildly intriguing too. It’s too bad that Andrea, who has had a string of bad relationships in the show, is falling for this bad dude so shortly after things with Shane came to an end. On paper of course, Andrea has fallen for the still alive version of Dale, and the two have found themselves a family after multiple parents are killed.

Woodbury’s has its baggage in the AMC version of course. The man with one hand, Merle Dixon. Seriously, fuck that guy. I’d rather spend an evening with the Governor than have to see him again. This is just my opinion of course, but everyone I’ve spoken to said they could do without this Dixon too.

Not so awesome: that damn phone. I loved the storyline in the comic. Rick had hope, there were more survivors, people that could help the tired, lonely duo of he and Carl. After days and days of talking to these mysterious voices, he realizes the truth. It’s revealed that he’s simply been talking to his dead wife, and that the phone hasn’t even been plugged in. He doesn’t care: Rick packs the phone, so where ever he ends up, no matter what, he can talk to his beloved Lori (who he had a much better relationship with in Kirkman’s version).

The phone didn’t work that way in the show. Rick gets the first call at the beginning of the episode, and before the 42 minutes are up, he realizes that he’s just crazy. It just wasn’t as effective. It didn’t last long enough for me to get that hope that maybe, just maybe, there were people out there willing to help them.

Hounded finally began to bridge the gap between the prison and Woodbury. The comic found Rick, Glenn, and Michonne (who had been with the survivors for some time, while in the AMC version she literally just met them as this episode closed) looking for more survivors after the helicopter crash. As I’ve mentioned before, this didn’t go well. Within moments of meeting Governor, the trio realized that this was not a nice place, and Rick’s hand was hastily removed after he resisted what they had planned for him. Michonne then spent the better part of the week being brutally raped and tortured for information before finally escaping. It looks like that may fall to Maggie in the AMC version, as she and Glenn are now captives of the Governor.

It’ll be extremely interesting to see what happens here. I can only hope that the Governor is more kind to Maggie than he was to the paper version’s Michonne. Not because I like Maggie more, but because that shit was hard enough to read, and I can’t imagine seeing it acted out! Glenn is of course captive too, and it would be tough to watch Glenn react if he has to listen to the love of his life in a situation like that.

With a title like When the Dead Come Knocking, it looks like next week we’ll finally be introduced to the series’ infamous knockers. These fleshy tricksters are bound to cause quite a problem with our gang of survivors (that was a joke, a horrible, horrible joke).

I can’t wait to see what happens next week! Though I have to admit that I’m even more excited for tomorrow, when Telltale’s incredible version of The Walking Dead will close its first storyline! Buy the game immediately.

Thanks for reading!