‘The Walking Dead’ season 3, episode 4 review: Death and all his friends

When Coldplay first performed the song that we’re using as the title for Sunday night’s game-changing episode of “The Walking Dead” season 3, we have a pretty good feeling that they did not mean it quite like this. It’s hard not to stress the following enough: if you have not seen this episode yet, your life will be ruined if you continue on here.

There were warnings that the death toll in the prison would be large this week … but who knew it would be this large, and this devastating? We’ll start with a tiny obituary to the prisoner Andrew: we barely knew you, and apparently you were a pretty bad dude behind bars. Therefore, it’s hard to really mourn your death that much. Sorry.

From here, it admittedly gets far more difficult as the three characters who are seemingly dead were all a major part of the show.

T-Dog – Just when this character was finally starting to reach his true potential, he was taken from us thanks to the sheer horror that is a prison alarm more or less telling the walkers to come devour his soul. His death was not immediate, as he was bitten first while trying to help Carol before eventually succumbing to the horde.

Carol – Is she really dead or alive? We saw her headscarf on the ground, but there was no body. With that in mind, this is a mini-obituary of sorts. If you are indeed dead, Carol, you will be missed; however, you have to think the lack of a body was an intentional move … right?

Lori – Now, we turn to the devastating part. Lori died at the end of the episode in childbirth, and it may be have surpassed anything from last season as the most devastating moment in the show’s three-year history. There are no words really to describe what was harder to watch: the birth scene, or Carl shooting her in the head to ensure that she did not come back a walker. This was a necessarily evil in many ways for Rick to evolve, but did it really have to happen in this episode? Some deaths can be forgotten, but there is not turning back now for these characters.

There was some action in Woodbury this week, as we saw Merle take off with a map to Hershel’s Farm in order to find his brother. As great as these scenes were last week, they really did not hold a candle to the prison action this time. What happened to Lori was just too devastating for us to really think about this in any other way, so apologies to Michael Rooker and company for the time being.

What is your reaction to “The Walking Dead” season 3 killing off as many as four characters within a single episode?