I liked "Too Far Gone" a lot. That isn't too surprising given that the mid-season finales of "Walking Dead" tend to be among the best episodes of any season. And this one was playing with a stacked to begin since I was DESPERATE to spend an hour with any character other than "Brian" after the last two episodes. But there was lots of stuff to like here.
Perhaps first and foremost, our time with The Governor has come to an end. I have to say I didn't expect him to die here (even though I know some person(s) was getting the ax based on Facebook/Twitter chatter), but that's mostly because I don't think it makes any sense to kill him when they did. Don't get me wrong, I'm glad they did. And after waffling back forth for a season and a half, I'm ready to declare that the character was indeed a failure in his television incarnation. But why now? Why not at the end of the third season?
Briefly perusing the reviews of this "Too Far Gone" on various sites, it was a common reaction: why wasn't this the finale to season 3? And it's hard to come up with a good reason why it wasn't. The logical ending to season 3 was the Governor and his people storming the prison and either succeeding, or failing with The Governor dying in the process. Instead, we got a weird non-ending only to have The Governor pop up again a few episodes into the next season, ramble through a couple of mostly boring episodes designed to build up his back story, then die anyway. I thought those Governor episodes were a waste of time when I watched them initially. Now, knowing that The Governor and most of the characters he met are now dead, I think it was a waste of time and I want my two hours back too.
But all that complaining aside, The Governor did meet his end in an extremely fitting manner, and this was an incredibly eventful episode otherwise. Hershel bit the bullet (in probably the most affecting death in the history of the series) along with Judith. The final action sequence was up to the incredible standard of this show, and several characters had genuinely cool heroic moments (Darryl, Michonne, and Carl primary among them). Furthermore, at the end of it all, Rick and company appear to be scattered to the winds. It looks like they've hit the reset button on The Walking Dead again, and that is probably for the best. The show tends to get stale when bogged down in one place for too long.
I don't know how long our heroes will be separated, but I look forward to them perhaps having some isolated adventures and meeting up with new, unique characters. I'm also curious to see if the show will introduce a new "big bad", or if the focus will be more on the characters surviving on the road and fighting zombies. The aftermath of Hershel's death should also be interesting. It will be tough to wait until February, but "Too Far Gone" succeeded in keeping me hooked until then.
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