Sarah Mastroni – News Editor –
“This isn’t a democracy anymore.”
Those gripping last words declared in the season two finale of the hit television show,“The Walking Dead” have been keeping fans on edge since its end this past March.
The Emmy award-winning drama is due back for its third installment starting on Sunday, Oct. 14, and fans across the globe are anticipating what the surviving members of the group will be getting themselves into as they approach the prison sequence of the series.
Touted by Entertainment Weekly as “the greatest thriller ever produced for television,” The Walking Dead is based on Robert Kirkman’s best-selling graphic novels of the same name. The show follows Officer Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) after he awakes from a coma to find the world as he knew it has gone into a post-apocalyptic zombie hell. During the ongoing quest to find his family, military aid and an answer to the madness, character relationships develop and wither, people die… and come back, and the constant struggle to survive remains an exhausting day-to-day task.
According to AMC, the show’s network station which also boasts award-winning hits such as Mad Men and Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead raked in over nine million viewers for the season two finale, and with high ratings throughout its run, the show has since become the number one series on cable for men ages 18-54, in all of television history.
For any fan of gore, guts and all things that go bump in the night, The Walking Dead will most certainly deliver in that sense. What a new viewer can expect from the show in general is the beauty of character-development. There is an ironic sense of relatability; the ongoing struggle to make relationships work is what makes this show stand out from the swarm of zombie-esque movies both past and present. Getting a fair share of zombie attacks in one episode is inevitable, but what makes the show so gripping is the interpersonal relationships built and destroyed amidst the apocalypse.
This show is more so about how people choose to treat each other at the end of the world. Everyone who is surviving is surviving trauma, and every seemingly minute obstacle stands in their way of life and death. After the group’s farm and safe haven is overrun last season, viewers can expect the remaining characters to feel an extreme loss of hope for living, and any sense of value for the lives of others will dwindle.
What to expect this season: although the show strays from the graphic novels in a character sense, the settings are about the same. The viewer is about to experience the prison, and for comic readers, we know things are about to take a turn for the worse.
What seems to be a temporary peace of mind for remaining members of Grimes’ group will soon turn into a battle for the ultimate form of shelter, but it won’t be with the walkers. The viewer will be introduced to a whole different type of scary; the type of fear brought about by living, human savages who will literally do whatever it takes to stay alive. Cue “The Governor.”
Played in the comic by a sick, sadistic human, the show will likely portray those characteristics. The part is played by British actor, David Morrissey, who will bring an element of inhuman survival tactics, by ruling a small community called Woodbury. When he gets wind of outlying prison, he will stop at nothing to have it.
The Walking Dead’s executive producer, Glen Mazzara, speaks intimately to AMC on what The Governor will bring to the show.
“Part of the attraction of The Walking Dead for our fans is that it feels real, and that means that The Governor has to feel real,” he said. “He needs to be a person who has a real soul and has a depth and intelligence, and he’s not just a cardboard arch-villain who’s going to play as a foil to our characters.”
New characters are introduced, such as the machete-wielding Michonne, a comic favorite, but as the past two seasons have proved, building a relationship with any one character can prove to be heartbreaking. With any sort of ego, no character seems to last that long.
Will the fate of the good survivors change, or will the power and ruthlessness of the bad ones outweigh their luck? In this post-apocalyptic hell, the only way to find out is to tune in.