‘The Walking Dead’ season 3 spoilers: About those extra survivors…

Sunday night’s season 3 premiere for “The Walking Dead” brought us plenty of interesting moments, but the one we figure that most people are talking about at this very moment revolves around what we saw at the very end of the episode: namely, that there are five people still alive at the prison who have somehow find a way to survive everything that has transpired there so far. These former inmates could either be friends or foes to Rick and his band of survivors, and hopefully we are going to find out just who they are or what their motivation will be pretty soon.

So how does the man behind the show describe these new additions, which should already feel familiar to fans of the comic franchise? Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, executive producer Glen Mazzara had the following to say:

“This group of prisoners saw the outbreak happen in their prison almost a year ago and guards were turning on prisoners and prisoners were tuning on guards … Imagine a zombie movie set in a prison. These are the sole survivors of that movie. And they’ve been locked up with each other for almost a year, and now suddenly they’re freed by Rick and Daryl and the group and have had no idea what’s happened to the rest of the world. Part of our thinking was, there were so many people during the Katrina disaster that were trapped. There was this one hospital where people were trapped and just waiting for help. That’s who these guys are. They’ve been waiting almost a year for help. And help never arrives. And they end up meeting Rick and the group and being set free and they have no idea what’s happened out there in the larger world, so in a way they are sort of like Rip Van Winkle waking up in the middle of a horrible apocalyptic nightmare.”

There have been some minor changes here in between the two properties, namely in that the character of “Dexter” is no longer named that thanks to the Showtime series of the same name. As for what other sort of changes are coming up, that is going to be more of a “wait and see” situation.

Do you like seeing these prisoners enter the fold right about now?