Channel Surfing: \'The Walking Dead\'s Latest Victim

This season, the critics Mike Hale and Neil Genzlinger are checking out favorite shows and seeing how they hold up. Previous entries in this series include posts on “New Girl,” “NCIS,” “Scandal,” “The Good Wife,” “30 Rock,” “Dexter” and “Supernatural.”

“The Walking Dead,” AMC's zombie-apocalypse series, doesn't have the best writing or acting on television, but most episodes have a scene or two that are more powerful - emotionally, physically or both - than what we're used to in our prime-time entertainments.

One of those came at the end of the Season 3 premiere on Sunday night, when the doughty Hershel (Scott Wilson) - who had just upbraided a heavily pregnant Lori (Sarah Wayne Callies) for wanting to give in to her despair - became the latest victim of the walkers, as the shambling undead are known.

Badly bitten in the heel, Hershel should have been done for. But Rick (Andrew Lincoln), the former deputy whose reluctant assumption of leadership is one of the show's abiding themes, made a quick decision: grabbing a hatchet, he chopped off Hershel's leg below the knee, possibly saving his life - though that remains to be seen.

The sequence was intense, exciting and, by TV standards, extremely graphic - the latest reminder of how thoroughly “The Walking Dead” has moved the realistic gore of the slasher film into the television mainstream. The show has also made the destruction of the walkers - incapacitating the brain via knife, sword, gun, arrow, metal rod or baseball bat - a matter-of-fact, almost comically routine event in a way that's perfectly logical within the story but could still give pause to those concerned about our continuing desensitization to violence.

Movies often make brutality and queasy tension bearable by forcing us to laugh at our own fear and discomfort , but “The Walking Dead” takes a different route, couching its comic-book violence in a slow, melancholy story of survival and camaraderie much like an old Hollywood western. As with many of those westerns, it's a morality tale, rigorously controlling pace and mood to facilitate an examination of savagery, justice and our notions of civilization.

Season 3 beganswith the small band of humans on the run after walkers overran Hershel's farm in last season's finale. Lori's advanced pregnancy signals that some months have elapsed, and we can see right away that other dynamics have changed. Carol (Melissa McBride) and Maggie (Lauren Cohan) have become more confident, and young Carl Grimes (Chandler Riggs) is now a full-fledged, gun-wielding zombie fighter with a budding interest in Hershel's younger daughter, Beth (Emily Kinney).

Everyone in the group, with the exception of Lori and Beth, now takes part in the efficient, choreog raphed killing of walkers. But Rick is showing the strains not just of leadership but also of guilt (over his killing of his best friend Shane last season) and anger (at the fact that Shane was the father of Lori's baby). Still, it's Rick who has the idea of breaking into the prison, where they might find food, medicine and weapons, and taking shelter inside a locked cell block - even if it means fighting their way through crowds of infected prisoners and guards. And it will be Rick who decides how to deal with the episode's big surprise: a new batch of humans, apparently inmates who have hidden out deep inside the prison.

Nothing happens quickly in “The Walking Dead,” and the opener provides no clues to the helicopter seen overhead in last season's finale, or any sign of the British actor David Morrissey, scheduled to appear this season as the Governor (a major character in the comics on which the show is based). We are given a glimpse of the missing Andrea (Lauri e Holden), who has been saved by the so-far-mysterious Michonne (Danai Gurira), a character who wields a ninja sword and keeps a pair of armless walkers on leashes - comic-book touches that feel out of place in the somber context of the TV show.

If you're a “Walking Dead” watcher, let us know what you thought of the season opener. Will Rick keep it together? Will Carol and Daryl get together? Will the two groups of survivors be able to live together? Speculation is welcome in the comments.