After waiting, anticipating and feasting on appetizers for the flesh fest that is ‘The Walking Dead,’ the premiere of season 3 has come.

An extreme close up of a walker’s eye starts the show. The alphas of the group raid a home in silence sans the sounds of guns firing with makeshift silencers. The group, including the now heavily pregnant Lori, begins to set up camp in a random home. Carl has become a soldier. Gone are the days of his escapes from the house. It appears he is finally allowed to thrive as Lori has 99 problems and whether or not Carl is in the house isn’t one of them. The kid scavenges some cans of dog food and the exhausted group looks at him with understanding mixed with disgust as he opens the cans.

It’s been months, it appears that all my questions about what happens to zombies in the winter will remain unanswered. The group has been migrating around Georgia looking for a home base that has the “safe” aura of the farm.
Just as they begin to settle…they have to move. Hungry walkers have already found them. They roll out as fast as they came in. After a jaunt up a back road, they stop to concoct a game plan. They discover that they are being boxed in by the roaming herds.

Daryl (Norman Reedus) returns with his blunt, but appealing vigor. After inviting Rick to hunt while the rest “wash their panties,” they come across the jail that we saw in the closing scene of last season. Rick proclaims it “perfect.” Before you can blink they are cutting through the wires to get into the protective fencing. They wipe out the field full of walkers. Carol has also begun to pull her weight and can now wield a rifle as she and Daryl take a guard tower and rain down backup for Rick.

As they settle in for the night in the cleared field, Daryl and Carol are clearly moving forward in their pseudo-relationship. She brings him something to eat as he keeps watch over the group. After she begins to complain about her shoulder he rubs it for about 30 seconds before getting an odd look on his face and stopping. Carol jokes about it being romantic and suggests they “screw around.”

I like this new and improved Carol. Daryl shrugs her off and they return to the group who is having a ‘Kum Ba Yah’ sing along.

Lori is still an un-pleasable bitch. She sits around the fire as Rick announces that the jail could be a gold mine, but they will have to go in and fight their way through in a hand-to-hand combat as they are running low on ammo.
Lori follows Rick as he goes back to patrol. She patronizes him to the point he starts to snap at her. He is trying to move things along as she confirms that the baby will is ready to pop out any day. He is clearly sick of her as she wants to “get the house in order,” but asks that Rick give the group a few days of camping outside. The Ricktatorship has begun. He informs Lori that if she wants to talk, she needs to cry to Hershel as he is busy “doing things.”

“You need to talk, talk to Hershel,” he says. “I’m doing stuff, I’m doing things. Isn’t that enough?”

Michonne! FINALLY! She easily slays 3 walkers in country-esque drug store, grabs some aspirin and exits. That’s it. The clip we saw during all those teasers is what we get.

Back to the group who is fighting their way through the prison yard. Rick, Daryl, Glen, Maggie, T-Dog stay in circle as they come across zombified guards donned in bullet proof gear. Rick struggles and calls upon Daryl whose arrows bounce off the protected walkers. Maggie discovers a kill shot to the neck after lifting their helmets. She has become a badass over the winter. Upgrade.

They push further in and open the door to the meat of the prison. Covered in blood, T-Dog and his fire-poker, Daryl and his crossbow, Rick and his respective weapon, and Glen and his axe along with Maggie armed with her big ass knife go in with little hesitation. Rick finds keys in the inner guard tower after picking them off a corpse. This opens doors to the cells. Without exchanging words, the fighters of the group begin a clean out cell block C. The rest of the group join them and begin to settle in.

Carl must have hit puberty and begins macking on Beth. Glen inspects Maggie for scratches and it is sweet in a blood drenched gory kinda way. Carol and Lori sit together taking their new refuge in. Daryl refuses to be in a “cage” and makes a small camp for himself on the second floor. Rick, who is giving Lori a cold shoulder that almost makes you feel sorry for her, collapses on the floor.

After the break, we get back to Michonne who has a very sick Andrea in a deer cooler and her “pet” zombies tied up. The armless, jawless twin walkers still lunge for her as she walks by, but she shows no worry. Andrea looks terrible as Michonne gives her the aspirin and water. These two have a good dynamic already. Andrea doesn’t believe Michonne’s lie that everything is “quiet” out in the world and states that she knows “they’re coming.” She deduces that they need to leave and begs the sword wielding woman to go on without her. Her pleas fall on deaf ears. They leave together with the pets in tow.

We return to the prison where Lori is losing her shiz. She thinks the baby is already dead and begs Hershel to kill her if she dies in child birth and fears that the baby is infected and will rip her apart if it has died.

Hershel does his best to calm her down as Lori confides that Rick is punishing her for all the crap she pulled. She cries as she states that Rick “hates” her.

“If we’re all infected, then so is the baby,” she says. “What if it’s stillborn? What if it’s dead inside me right now, what if it rips me apart?”

Once again, the fab five take Hersel along as they go to clear out another cell block. Carl locks the door as they go out and Rick doesn’t spare Lori a second glance.

The fighters go into the depths of the prison where they mark their path with spray paint for a quick exit should the need arise. Corners become flooded with walkers and every exit becomes filled with dead prisoners. Maggie and Glen get separated as small herds box them in. Hershel splits to find Maggie and steps over what he thought was just a dead body. The walker takes a chunk out of his calf and they manage to drag him to an empty room where Rick deems the only way to keep him alive is to chop off Hershel’s leg. That is exactly what he does. He starts hacking with a small axe just below the knee. Hershel slips into unconsciousness and Rick sees that he is bleeding out.

They aren’t as alone as they thought. Daryl sees a small group of men peeking through a fenced in area and he quietly tells the group to duck and whips around to shoot only to find the men wide-eyed and gawking as one mutters “Holy sh*t!”

END of Season 3 episode 1

This didn’t answer too many questions and I was hoping to get more Michonne. The strongest edge is the silence that conveys everything. A show can be broken on dialogue, but this series stands alone on the ability to be awesome without a word being exchanged.

This episode stressed Lori and Rick’s status. Their marriage is suffering and Carl seems to have chosen sides with Rick. It’s a nice contrast to where we last saw him – crying in Lori’s lap.

What is Andrea suffering from? The flu? It appears to be another mystery of what happened during the winter.

The walkers appear to be tracking the group. Are they capable of some cognitive thinking/instinct beyond smell?

Note: I have managed to resist reading the comic to get a taste of what is to come so bear with me on theories and opinions.