‘The Walking Dead‘ roars to life in ‘Made To Suffer‘, its mid-season finale.

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Last episode left us hanging as Glen and Maggie were being tortured by Merle and The Governor in Woodbury. But Rick, Darryl, Michonne and the gang were en route to rescue them.

***SPOILER ALERT! Do not watch until you’ve seen the mid-season finale. You’ve been warned.


Why they chose to start this episode with a new group of people we could care less about is anyone’s guess. This crew is led by Tyrese, who seems just as likable and lunkheaded as Rick. When a woman in the group is bitten, her husband begs for the group to spare her. Given that is the one die-hard rule so that you don’t die hard…they leave her alive. Sigh.

But they stumble upon the prison, where young Carl locates them and rescues them to safety. He also offers to put the woman out of her misery with his gun. But they decline saying they’ll take care of their own, and Tyrese proceeds to bash the poor woman’s head in with a hammer. This is better than a shotgun blast in what way? With friends like Tyrese….

But then Carl locks them away from his group, giving them their own section of the prison without worrying about any threat they may bring. And Axl,the skeezy convict with the mustache makes pervy advances on teenage Beth, and when Carol tells him to knock it off he begins hitting on her, but only after he figures out that a haircut doesn’t decide your sexual orientation. Idiot.

Meanwhile, back to the part of the story that people actually care about:

The Governor tells Merle that he can take Glen and Maggie to the ‘screamer pits‘, but fails to elaborate further. The Governor plans on attacking the prison camp location they gave up, but he’s unaware he’s being beaten to the punch.

 
Meanwhile Michonne breaks into the Governor’s home and discovers his sick secrets; the undead heads floating in fish tanks are bad enough but she’s understandably even more freaked by his undead daughter (Penny) chained with a bag over her head.

The Governor walks in and pleads for her to leave Penny unharmed, but she does the merciful thing and puts her out of her misery.

This leads into a brutal fight scene where Michonne gouges out the Governor’s eye with a shard of glass. Laurie bursts onto the scene and pulls a gun on her old friend. But as she reels from the gruesome discovery, she lets her escape.

Michonne then reconvenes with her teammates who aren’t too pleased that she disappeared all willy-nilly.

With the group now reunited, Glen tells them that Merle is alive and well and that he tortured them for information. Darryl is stunned by the news but thinks he can reason with him.

As the group begins to make their way over the wall, Darryl stays behind.

Later, the Governor tells his group that he thought they were safe, but now he’s afraid. He blames Merle for leading the group to their camp and tells him he’s to be executed, and then leads out a now-captive Darryl to join him.

Andrea sees this and stares with the same look she always has; like she’s battling constipation. And she sits back and does nothing. Big shocker. Roll credits.

So we’ll have to wait until February to see where things end, but since Darryl is running around with his cross-bow in the previews obviously he’s gonna escape. Way to build the suspense AMC!

I’m sure ‘The Walking Dead‘ will fly off the rails again, because it occasionally forgets that the best characters are the Zombies and all the other stuff reeks of bad soap opera. The populace of the show are all red-shirts, each very replaceable. Just keep the action and the guts flying please. This episode did it well, making all my snarky talking points terms of endearment, not profound annoyance.

Looking for cool holiday presents for ‘Walking Dead’ fans? Check out my lists of the Best Geek Gifts, Geek Collectibles and Best DVD/Blu-Ray sets for other ‘Walking Dead’ related merchandise as well as other horror and sci-fi related goodness.

(And check out my recap of the Boardwalk Empire season finale).
 

And check out our list for the Best TV Shows of 2012!