‘The Walking Dead’ season 3 finale review: Laurie Holden shines, and is [spoiler] dead?

“The Walking Dead” has built up to Sunday night’s season finale for a good six months, and we ultimately have to say that it was definitely worth the wait. There was more violence in here than we really know where to start with, and there are also some familiar faces that we’ll definitely miss.

The first death we saw coming, mostly because Dallas Roberts has signed on for some other things: Milton. The Governor not only killed him, but left his body sitting in a room with a locked-up Andrea, basically putting her in a situation where she was almost guaranteed to die. The key word? Almost. This was a story about Andrea’s survival, and Laurie Holden did a pretty brilliant job of conveying all of this emotion as she tried to save her life.

While Andrea was going through this, The Governor was basically on a warpath, and after failing at the prison, he then turned his attention on some of his own people. The plan for Rick and company then turned to finding a way to hunt him down, but he is unfortunately still out there somewhere. Rick instead found Andrea at the very end, and it turned out that her battle for survival was unfortunately not enough. She instead up shooting herself after being bitten, that way she could really go out on her own terms.

Perhaps the most shocking event of the entire episode to us, though, was Carl shooting a kid that really didn’t deserve his fate. Why do this? The saddest part about it was that it showed the dark transformation that this character was going through after seeing Lori’s death and so many other horrible things. Even sadder was that either Rick didn’t believe Hershel, or didn’t want to. It wasn’t until later that Rick finally got the truth out of him, and this made for quite a complicated father / son moment.

In the closing seconds, we saw that the Woodbury residents remaining all joined Rick and company at the prison. Ultimately, this was a pretty big move in that it looks as though the setting will stay the same next season … but The Governor is still out there, and that spells trouble.

What did you think about this finale? If you want to check out some early “Walking Dead” teasers for season 4, you can do so over at the link here.

Photo: AMC