This last week's The Walking Dead episode was pretty crazy, delivering a great twist and giving us hints of how the character development is going to develop over the season. Save the Last One was the third episode of season 2 of The Walking Dead and episode 4 will air tonight, on AMC, at 6pm EST and 9 pm PST. If you happened to have missed nay episode this season, they currently have recaps videos of each aepisode available to watch online over at AMC. They addressed some of my complaints of the season so far by giving us an action packed episode with some good moments for Glenn, played by Steven Yeun. This episode wasn't perfect, even with it's great moments and storyline, it still had quite a few scenes that involved characters contemplating, again, giving up on life and the world. There has been three episodes so far of the characters being down and depressed, which is understandable to an extent, but I sure hope the rest of the season isn't filled with same self loathing attitudes that seems to spread itself among the survivors like a contagious disease.



Spoilers Ahead
The episode starts out great, immediately giving us something to ponder the whole episode; why is Shane shaving his head? The episode quickly comes back to the present when we see Otis and Shane running down a hall with a throng of zombies chasing them. As the episode rolls on along we see how Otis and Shane's situation develops. We keep going back and forth between the high school and the farm, with a few scenes from the rest group, but the main focus of this episode is the farm and the high school. Once again, this episode shows us that it is a far different story than that of the comics, specifically with the one death that occurs this episode.



At the farm we see Rick and Lori reunited, both of whom are still struggling to stay hopeful about Carl. Carl seems to be okay, he even wakes up once, but towards the end of the episode we see that without the medicine ,that Shane and Otis are out to find, he will likely not make it till the next day. With Rick and Lori we also see some annoying conversations about whether or not to let Carl live in this world. While the conversations do almost reach a plausible point they feel a bit unneeded, but I'm glad that Rick's I want us all to live point of view wins out against Lori's pessimistic attitude. Sure, the world is covered and destroyed by zombies, but is it too much to ask that at least half our of survivors have some optimism about their existence.



While there is a lot of focus of the farm and the high school we also get a few scenes with Daryl, Andrea, Dale and T-Dog. T-Dog and Glenn head straight for the farm at the beginning of the episode, while the others plan to stay around the freeway for the moment, just in case Sophia returns to the freeway to look for them. We continually see Daryl's strong convictions as he heads out alone in the night in order to look for Sophia and Andrea tags along. They have an interesting scene where they find another campsite and see the fate of someone who hung themselves, but they still became a zombie. Everything about wanting to know whether Andrea wants to kill herself feels very redundant and uninteresting, if I were Daryl I would not bet for something like that, but the writers of the show seem intent on trying to create some kind of mystery to Andrea. T-Dog doesn't get much time this episode, but Glenn does finally get some time, specifically with Maggie, Hershel's daughter. Glenn and Maggie discuss god and start cultivating some kind of romantic relationship between the two, one that will likely cause some kind problems later on. Lauren Cohan and Steven Yeun do have some great acting moments with regards to this scene, but the best acting of the episode has to be from Jon Bernthal, Shane.



As the episode comes fully circle we find Shane and Otis separated at the high school, running out of ammo, dripping with sweat from exhaustion and Shane has a twisted ankle from a jump out of a window. One of the best moments of the episode was when Shane falls against a fence, sweat dripping off his face, exhaustion in his eyes and zombies in all directions. The next we hear is gunshots and then we see Otis and Shane running down a street together, both exhausted and very low ammo. Initially, we see that Shane comes back to the farm alone with all of the medical supplies, the supplies that save Carl in the nick of time.  Right at the end of the episode we learn why Shane looks so shaken up. He tells everyone that Otis told him to move on and that he will cover him, but at the end of the episode we see why he was shaving his head. It was an excellent scene  that shot back and forth between him shaving his head and his tortured memories, as he remembers what really happened. Otis didn't want to give himself to save them, Shane shot him in order to escape merely because he saw no other way for him to survive. I like to think that he did it all for Carl, because he took care of him for a long time and he cares greatly for him. Even with that thought it is still hard to justify what he did, he let that man die, a man who was doing everything he could to make up for shooting Carl. Who know's what kind of character Shane will turn into because of this, but he certainly will be different. In in the end it was a great twist that left the episode on an interesting note.

Violent Score: 9 (out of 10)


Tune in later this week for a review of the next episode. Thanks for reading and you can check out The Walking Dead every Sunday on AMC.
-Written by Sean Cargle