Today I will be doing a spoiler-free review of season 3 of The Walking Dead. This is the first season where we start getting a lot more action in each episode. Before it was just occasional episodes with most being story-driven. Now we start getting into heavy-action episodes while still telling a good story. This season is the same main group led by Rick, Daryl, Herschel, and Glenn finding a new home in an abandoned prison. A lot of the side characters remain the same in Carol, Lori, Carl, Maggie, and T-Dog. We are also introduced to a very important character in Michonne as she finds Andrea after all the chaos at the end of season 2. All of the characters do very well in their roles this season with Rick being phenomenal the entire time. He was once again the standout this season with Scott Wilson who played Hershel doing very well too. It is also important to note that there is about a 7-8 month time jump between seasons 2 and 3. I was a major fan of this season and I feel like it picked up right where season 2 left off. Even though some episodes are heavy action (which are all great) there are also some heavy story-driven episodes with very little action (that are also great). Episodes 12, 13, and 16 are all standout episodes this season for me. The best one though was easily episode 4 titled “Killer Within” and this is just chaotic from beginning to end. The acting was also top-notch from everyone in this episode.
The antagonist this season, for the first time, was a human named The Governor. He leads a town named Woodbury where everything is not as it seems. There isn’t much I can say about this and the town without spoilers but the story building to the ultimate war between Rick’s group and Woodbury is fantastic and there is so much tension in every episode. There is also a lot of very weird and interesting stuff that goes down without the townspeople knowing about. There are obviously still walkers in this season and in every season but they aren’t as focused on starting at this point. They are still always looming though, which is the downfall of most characters. There isn’t many things I can honestly complain about in this season except maybe the pacing. There were more episodes in this season that I didn’t care for as compared to the previous seasons. Now, that also may be because there are 16 episodes now compared to six in season 1 and thirteen in season 2. However, pacing was an issue at times but besides that everything else hits to near perfection.
I always rate shows I watch and I rate them based on 10 things in the show. Those things are: action, acting, cinematography, pacing, score, characters, ending, plot, protagonist, and antagonist. I rate all of those pieces 1-10 and then after that, I add up the scores of all 10 of them and get a total score out of 100. I gave this season a 93/100, as I said this season is really great and basically everything is at least really good. I just don’t like it quite as much as season 2, but there’s probably only one season that is going to get over season 2, so it’s definitely not an indictment on this season.
