The Walking Dead - 'Prey,' or Why You Should Have Listened to Michonne - Review

Wow! We came back from a couple of weeks of character-story building to pure adrenaline. Prey focused mostly on Andrea’s flight from Woodbury and the Governor’s pursuit – in an edge-of-your-seat, nail-biting hunt. As a side story, we saw Milton forced to pick a side and Tyreese’s group pulled deeper into the Governor’s craziness – but more on that later.

Andrea redeemed herself for a series of questionable decisions throughout this season with a single scene - the shot of her walking away as the Governor appeared to be overtaken by walkers. She had other strong moments as well – fighting off three walkers who had her trapped in the woods, and taking aim at the Governor while he was in his torture room, until Milton interrupted.

And speaking of Milton – my thought after he stopped Andrea from killing the Governor is he deserves what he gets. And what he’ll get won’t be pretty since the governor no longer has a use for his research with Penny gone. And now that the Governor knows Milton warned Andrea and possibly sabotaged his plans, Milton’s pretty much dead already. (I still miss Shane sometimes.)

But back to the episode

We start with a flashback of Andrea and Michonne talking about the two walkers with them. Michonne is being characteristically nonverbal, but suggests she knew them and says, “They weren’t human to begin with,” which makes a nice segue to the Governor and his latest home renovation project.

The Governor is building a torture chamber for Michonne. Milton is freaked out at the Governor’s “workshop” - enough to show Andrea the room but not enough to let her kill the Governor. His logic is that killing the Governor would get her killed (true), and the Martinez would take over (true), and that it wouldn’t save her friends (this one lost me). Why would Martinez be motivated by a revenge trip that would get most of their community killed? His walker daughter wasn’t killed by Michonne, he didn’t lose an eye, and he doesn’t appear crazy. But Andrea buys it. Milton won’t go with Andrea to the prison, but Andrea tells him, “If you stay, you can’t keep looking the other way.”

Andrea makes a break for it, but not before warning Tyreese and Sasha that the Governor is not what he seems, and not before we learn Tyreese is a lousy shot. As Andrea runs away, Sasha tells Tyreese he shouldn’t have let her go. “What did you want me to do, shoot her?” Little do you know soon you’ll be shooting babies if you stick with the Governor, Tyreese.

Next we learn Milton is a lousy liar as he pretends he didn’t warn Andrea. The Governor sees through it and figures out Milton told Andrea the deal was about Michonne.

Tyreese and Sasha are enlisted for a job with Martinez, and they trade words with the annoying guy from their group. Something about some drama about a Donna. OK, let’s stop right there. We’re too close to the end of the season for some drama about a dead woman I don’t care about. Luckily Martinez interrupts and stops it and brings them to what looks like extermination pits for the undead. But the drama only resurfaces there (something about Tyreese saving Donna while the other guy couldn’t) and we see a glimpse of Tyreese’s temper. OK, I have to interrupt again. How is this guy (the one whose name I won’t learn, not Tyreese) still alive? He’s both dumb and annoying. How has he not been picked off yet in a world with such a high mortality rate?

Hunting trip

It’s Game On in the countryside as the Governor heads out in search of Andrea. Andrea, ducking the road as the Governor passes, has some three-on-one walker action but out-knifes them. I saw that attack coming. You never turn your back on a tree.

But later in an open field, she ducks too late. The Governor sees her and drives her toward some abandoned buildings. These buildings are always walker nests, but Andrea probably knows that. She picks her odds with the walkers over her odds with the Governor and heads inside.

The one-eyed hunter follows her into the building whistling his creepy Penny tune. While a lot of shows put their main characters in danger in suspenseful episodes, this one had me really guessing because unlike the lead characters of most of these shows, I’m only giving Andrea about a 50/50 chance for surviving the season.

In true slasher-flick format, we saw the Governor stalk his prey in a shadowy, run-down setting, where Andrea narrowly escapes time and again – until she’s cornered. Walkers block her escape, and the governor is right behind. But she turns the tables. She slips out into the walker-infested hallway and hides behind the door while turning the walkers loose on the governor. Outside she hesitates less than a minute on hearing the Governor’s cries as he’s run out of ammo, but walks away. Finally.

Of course escape will not be that easy. Exhausted, Andrea reaches the prison and spies Rick when she’s attacked from behind by the Governor. Rick thinks he sees something, but poor Rick thinks he’s hallucinating again. Poorer Andrea is recaptured and ends up in Michonne’s torture room.

While the Andrea/Governor hunt was taking place, someone was burning walkers. Apparently sabotaging the Governor’s plans, the hidden-from-us person sets fire to the walkers the Governor had planned to set loose on Rick’s group. Suspicion originally falls on Tyreese’s group, but Tyreese seems clueless. The Governor next turns his eye toward Milton.

Wrap up

While the Andrea/Governor cat-and-mouse game had me on the edge of my seat, the Tyreese story had me realizing how slow that storyline was progressing. Tyreese and his group have been on the show for almost half a season now and the story so far hasn’t been interesting. I don’t care about this Donna drama with the side character whose name I won’t bother learning.

Their exile from the prison hasn’t led anywhere yet. I’m guessing he’ll be the one to break Andrea out, and the two, or three of them if Sasha survives, will form an impressively dangerous team. The hints of his temper are intriguing, but so far this storyline has been dragging.

What do you think about the traitor in Woodbury? It doesn’t appear to be Tyreese. The obvious choice is Milton, whom the Governor appears to be eyeing, but what if it’s neither Tyreese nor Milton? Who does that leave? Sasha? The annoying man’s son? Or my choice – Martinez.

Last week we saw that Martinez is more than a dumb gun. He sees the big picture, and he seems to be a decent guy. Maybe he’s not OK with the governor’s increasingly maniacal plans.

So what are your thoughts? How do you think the next two weeks will go? Will Andrea ever see the outside of the Governor’s torture chamber? Will Milton make it past even next week’s episode? Who is Woodbury’s traitor?