Warning: This post—and likely its comment thread—contain speculation and potential spoilers.



The moment nine million of us have been waiting for is finally here: tomorrow, 9pm, Walking Dead Season 3 (S3).

Let's get logistics out of the way first. The show is riding under the new management that righted the ship during the second half of last season. Viewership is at an all-time high and never waned throughout. This is the first season where we know beforehand another one is on the way, even if it hasn't technically been confirmed. And like season 2, season 3 will consist of two eight-episode runs.

Inherently, those parameters will shape what we get possibly more than the comics themselves. We'll have untraditional peaks and valleys in the season's narrative (see Breaking Bad S4 v. S5). There's less pressure on the creative team to feed fans what they want in order to sustain ratings and secure an additional order of episodes. That means showrunner Glen Mazzara should have the freedom to further explore his team's vision, hinted at in the latter half of S2. (He comes from The Shield's coaching tree so to speak, so this is a good thing.)

Now, we all heard the complaints earlier this year. This isn't the first or last show to struggle with the in-between and nail the big moments (see also Sons of Anarchy, 24). However, highlights from the Mazarra half of S2 were so strong you can boil them down to a few words: Carl screws up. Dale. Shane. Goodbye farm. The overall season's highs and lows balanced out. This was a satisfying meal of blood and brains in the end.

But with two seasons in the books to analyze, larger areas of concern surfaced. Mid-season plot building has been slow and tedious. The group remaining at the start of S3 may be 11 strong, but only the show's producers care about the whole lot. (I'll personally take half: Rick, Herschel, Maggie, Glenn, Daryl, and S2 Andrea.) And is it possible to even have a show that combines good suspense (zombies, scary silence, action) with good drama (Rick v. Shane, the pregnancy)? That could be aspiring for too much. Things tend to get complicated when these two desires come into conflict.

No matter how loud the criticism gets, there are enough broad things the series does well to believe momentum will carry through this year. The Walking Dead consistently delivers strong starts and finishes—Rick escaping the hospital, the group navigating the abandoned highway, Barnaggedon. And both seasons also continually re-emphasized the hopelessness of this world—the CDC can't help, loved ones must be put down, everyone is actually a carrier. If you see what critics have been writing about the first two episodes (AMC—I'm still willing to consume your screeners), both trends continue.

We also know we're getting some serious character improvement before one spec of dialogue is heard. There's an increase in the amount of strong, non-white dudes with the entrance of Michonne and the continued, theoretical hardening of Andrea (in the episode one teaser, even T-Dog gets meaningful dialogue for once). And all though we've spent tons of screen time with characters like Hershel's-daughter-whose-name-I'd-have-to-look-up, expect to get invested more in characters like Michonne, The Governor, and Merle despite their limited or nonexistent prior screen time.

The biggest question for this season, though: just how much of the comic will be infused into the show this year? Make no mistake about it, the comics reach some dark areas perhaps never seen on TV when the prison/Woodbury plotlines surface (see the trailer above, both locations are coming). We're talking rape, decapitation, child murders, suicide attempts. The craziest SVU or Oz episodes don't begin to even compare.

Mazzara insisted during the summer that nothing is off the table but things wouldn't get "offensive for the sake of being offensive." He seems to believe TV may have less of a threshold for bleakness than comics do. It's hard to argue against that, as even the most straightforward of car-wreck-ahead tragedies have to provide something to root for (JACK COULD HAVE SURVIVED, DAMMIT).

With all those topics swirling around, S3 of The Walking Dead will be nothing if not interesting. Assuming the show continues its ratings domination, this year could be vital for the overall series. It'll either set the stage and the tone for S4 and beyond, or it'll make AMC regret its verbal commitment while scaring away all but the hardest of hardcore comic followers. That's a crossroads more compelling than, "to ditch or not to ditch our farm." Hopefully the stakes transfer to the screen.

Listing image by Brandon Hunt