How did we fare in an Andrea-centric episode?
Andrea (Holden) was the best she's ever been in the series this week.
This week's episode of The Walking Dead managed to put this season back on track, though it wasn't in the way I would have expected. True to form in the last few episodes, we got another one that focused on a small set of characters. In this case, we followed Andrea (Laurie Holden) and The Governor (David Morrissey), as well as a few other stragglers from Woodbury. How did we fare in an Andrea-centric episode? Read on to find out.
This episode didn't start out great, with Milton (Dallas Roberts) catching a glimpse at just how far his friend has fallen to the dark side. When he shares the information with Andrea, he begs her to leave and warn the group at the prison to get out. She instead opts to stay, and even has a good chance at killing The Governor thwarted by Milton. After she decides there's no way for her to kill him here, which is doubtful enough, she then proceeds to come to the realization that she has to leave Woodbury and go to the prison. If Andrea weren't so slow on the uptake, we could have skipped about five minutes of nothing this episode and she could have just left.
After that admittedly small hiccup, though, this episode rolled along just fine. We finally caught back up with Tyrese (Chad L. Coleman), who is still attached at the hip to the rest of his group, though that doesn't seem to have much more longevity to it. They were sent along with Martinez (Jose Pablo Cantillo) to wrangle up some walkers to unleash on the prisoners. This is about where Tyrese decided he didn't like this plan, which makes him a much quicker thinker than Andrea, and he made his displeasure known. Shortly after this fight, someone torched the zombies that were being held for the assault, and naturally Tyrese is the one who would get blamed for it. Everything after the fact pointed pretty strongly towards Milton, but who knows how this bout of misinformation will play out for any of the characters.
The real standout moments in this episode, though, came from Andrea, and her attempt to flee from Woodbury, and The Governor. Morrissey was at the top of his game this week, letting go of his character's sanity a bit without making him an over-the-top basket-case. The chase from the field, into the odd warehouse was expertly crafted, and played out like all of the best horror movies that do the same thing.
The Governor was cleaver, as we'd expect, but more importantly, Andrea showed us a little bit of how she managed to survive for so long. After a few lame attempts at avoiding her pursuer, she used a stairwell full of walkers to her advantage, cleverly hiding between the door and the wall as the horde slipped out to the attack The Governor.
The biggest payoff of the week, though, came when Andrea was just outside of the prison, and The Governor came out of nowhere to pull her down, just before Rick (Andrew Lincoln) could see her. I liked the brief cameo-like appearance by Rick in this episode, as it reminded us the other group was still there and doing stuff without taking way valuable screen time from the main story of the week.
This was a surprisingly successful episode of The Walking Dead, considering how much it relied on Andrea for it to work. The show seems to be moving towards these smaller scale, character-based episodes, which is more than alright with me, but hopefully the writers never lose track of the bigger episodes that give the series juice.
There are only two more episodes left in the season, so expect some pretty big things to go down in the next two weeks.