Killer Within

Plot

Someone outside the prison breaks the front gate's lock and draws a pack of walkers toward the building. Michonne grows suspicious about how the Governor got supplies from a National Guard camp, but he won't talk about it. She tells Andrea she thinks they should leave for the coast, but Andrea prefers to stay and gives Merle information about the Greene farm so he can search for Daryl. The Governor says Merle can look for his brother once he gets more solid details.

Andrea starts a romantic relationship with the Governor. Rick talks with the group about making the prison a permanent home. The two surviving prisoners, Axel and Oscar, ask to join, but Rick still doesn't trust them and says they'll have to leave by the end of the week. Everyone gathers to watch Hershel take his first steps since losing his right leg.

Suddenly, walkers flood the courtyard and the group scatters. T-Dog gets bitten on his right shoulder while closing the gate, then chases after Carol and throws himself into a crowd of walkers to give her a chance to get away. Rick, Glenn, and Daryl find the gate's lock broken and fix it to keep more walkers out. Rick blames Axel and Oscar for the attack, but then a backup generator kicks on and sets off an alarm that could attract even more walkers.

Rick realizes the prisoners couldn't have done it and lets them take him to the generator room. There they find Andrew, the man Rick left for dead, who started all the trouble. Andrew is about to kill Rick when Oscar shoots him with Rick's revolver and hands the gun back. They shut down the generator and silence the alarm.

Elsewhere, Carl watches over his mother Lori and Maggie while they hide in a boiler room. Lori goes into labor but bleeds heavily and can't deliver the baby properly there. She insists Maggie perform a deadly C-section to save the child, knowing it will kill her but wanting the baby to live. The baby comes out safely, but Lori dies.

Carl mourns for a moment, then shoots her in the head to stop her from turning. After the walkers are handled, the group meets back in the courtyard, though Carol is still gone. Rick sees Carl and Maggie come out of a cell block holding the baby, realizes Lori isn't with them, and breaks down.

Production

Sang Kyu Kim wrote "Killer Within," an episode directed by Guy Ferland for the third season of The Walking Dead. This marked Ferland's second directing credit for the season, following his work on episode three, "Walk with Me." The episode served as the last regular appearances for Sarah Wayne Callies as Lori and IronE Singleton as T-Dog. An early draft of the script originally killed off Melissa McBride's character, Carol, but the producers later swapped that fate to T-Dog instead.

Callies had repeatedly suggested Lori's death to former showrunner Frank Darabont, but it was Glen Mazzara who ultimately made the call to kill her off. The writing team decided to move the revelation earlier in the season to create "fresh" opportunities for the staff. Mazzara and Callies had minimal conversations about the specifics of Lori's death; Callies chose to wait for the script to learn more, reasoning that her character "doesn't know she's going to die."

She spent a couple of weeks rehearsing and revising dialogue with Mazzara, with some adjustments not originally in the script. Callies noted, "I just thought, it belongs there."

To prepare for the death scene, Callies watched Stanley Kubrick's war film Full Metal Jacket (1987) with Ferland. She admired Arliss Howard's performance and described his character's death as a quick, "kind of strange death." Callies did not rehearse the death scene with actor Chandler Riggs; instead, the final day of filming allowed them to have "so many emotions in [their] hearts," resulting in an emotionally raw performance. Producers trained Lauren Cohan to perform a Caesarian for the scene.

Callies wore a leotard-like rig that mimicked a pregnant abdomen, with a prosthetic abdomen later glued onto the suit, a process taking about an hour. Inside the prosthetic was additional layering simulating a uterus, which held the fetus. An insert shot captured the abdomen being sliced open, emphasizing the uncontrollable blood flow, which was pumped through a small tube attached to the front of the suit.

Singleton learned about his character's death before production of the third season began and had to keep it secret from the public, especially T-Dog's fans. He expressed gratitude for the "heroic" death, saying, "When I read [the script], I was thankful that he would go out as a hero. It made me feel really appreciated."

Themes

The central theme in "Killer Within" is death. T-Dog sacrifices himself to allow Carol to escape, while Lori dies after an improvised operation, and Andrew dies while trying to kill Rick. Kirkman wanted Rick and Carl to develop a different psyche during the season and Lori's death would serve as a catalyst for both characters' development. Rick's anguish manifests in much of the episode's concluding scene.

Kirkman agreed, proclaiming that not only was it inevitable, but it also develops Rick's character. Sarah Wayne Callies described her takes on the scene and its significance to TVLine: "I thought it was brilliant. I thought it was brilliantly shot to have Carl strong and cold in the foreground and Rick collapsed. I know they shot it a bunch of different ways.

There were a bunch of different ideas about how that scene could play. But it was beautiful because in some ways it’s the apotheosis of Carl. It’s this young boy having just performed a great act of both mercy and violence [against] his mother recognizing that dad’s not going to be able to get me through this right now, so I’ll be the strong one." Both T-Dog and Lori's deaths were heroic by design and reflected their personal lives.

Mazzara stated that T-Dog's stint as a football player became evident as "he just heroically acts as a linebacker and just clotheslines these walkers, even at his own expense." Regarding Lori's demise, he professed that childbirth was heroic: "That heroism of a woman giving birth and paying a price and just being focused on the survival of her children is a beautiful story, and a story that's actually taken place millions of times throughout history."

In his article for Entertainment Weekly, Darren Franich linked facets of Lori's death to the Book of Job and suggested that it acted as a "triple" catharsis for the character. Franich perceived Lori's extramarital affair with Shane Walsh (Jon Bernthal) as an allegorical allusion to Original Sin—a Christian theological concept of damnation—which then transitions into an "optimistic New Testament vision of hope" as Lori comes to terms with her destiny. "She was confident, and fearless, and heroic," Franich concluded in his review for "Killer Within".

Reception

The episode's initial broadcast attracted 9.27 million viewers, significantly down from the previous episode, which amassed 10.51 million viewers. "Killer Within" acquired a 4.9 rating in the 18-49 demographic. Despite steep decreases in weekly ratings, the episode was the night's top cable program in terms of ratings, beating out Real Housewives of Atlanta and Breaking Amish by a considerable margin. In the United Kingdom, "Killer Within" garnered 893,000 viewers, the most-viewed television program of the week on FX.

"Killer Within" was lauded by television commentators. The Washington Post entertainment journalist Jen Chaney said that "Killer Within" offered the "most emotionally upsetting development" in the series to date, a sentiment echoed by Time Nate Rawlings, who argued that the episode was The Walking Dead most powerful installment since "Beside the Dying Fire". Bex Schwartz wrote in her review for Rolling Stone magazine that "Killer Within" was the program's best episode to date.

The Huffington Post Maureen Ryan described it as a "taut, terrifically paced hour" with an "incredibly powerful ending", while Eric Goldman of IGN called it "an incredibly tense [and] unrelenting" episode in his 9.5 out of 10 review. The fates of Lori and T-Dog garnered favorable reviews from television commentators. According to HitFix writer Alan Sepinwall, the moment when Lori and Carl share their goodbyes was the most heartbreaking event since the ending of the second-season episode "Pretty Much Dead Already".

Los Angeles Times columnist Laura Hudson felt it was a grim departure for a character who endured long bouts of grief for reasons beyond her control. Erik Kain from Forbes magazine found Lori's death especially difficult to watch, and was shocked by T-Dog's "sudden" death despite the fact that he "was never as prominent a figure" on the program. "As hard as these deaths were to watch," Kain wrote, "they also give me faith in the show." Even though he stated that T-Dog died "a hero's death", Michael Rapoport of The Wall Street Journal concluded that Lori's "gut-churning" demise was the more memorable.

Lori's demise was featured in The Huffington Post list of "The Biggest 'OMG' TV Moments of 2012", and placed nineteenth in Slate article covering the year's most noteworthy television moments.