Earlier this week, I took part in an interview call to discuss Episode 5 of The Walking Dead Season 3 with Greg Nicotero and Danai Gurira. For the first part of the feature, I wanted to cover Greg Nicotero's answers to questions our readers have been asking about the latest episode. *Spoiler Warning: Don't read this if you haven't seen episode 3.05.
What Happened to Carol?: Since Greg Nicotero directed the episode, I thought this would be a great chance to get more details on Carol, Lori, and Daryl. The biggest question we've been seeing about this episode is: "What happened to Carol?" In episode 3.04, we see T-Dog save her and she goes outside into the prison courtyard. All they find is a scarf at the end, but we see a grave in 3.05. Did they find her body?
Greg Nicotero: "Well, you know, one of the challenging things about episode four was that she disappears. They find part of her clothing, but they’ve never found her. They’ve never really found Lori’s body; you just see sort of the remnants of the blood drag. So, as far as everyone knows, Carol has suffered the same fate as everyone else, but that will be revealed shortly."
The cast and crew have talked about the audience knowing more than the characters in the past. This is the case in Woodbury, where we all know that something is wrong with The Governor and the rest of the characters aren't aware. Obviously, Rick and the group are traumatized by the loss of T-Dog and Lori, and it sounds like they only assumed Carol was eaten.
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Did the Zombie Eat All of Lori?: Speaking of zombies completely eating bodies, we've seen some readers say that the zombie couldn't have eaten all of Lori, including her bones. However, I've been told that she wasn't completely eaten. We just weren't shown the body:
Greg Nicotero: "The idea is supposed to be that the walker has sort of dragged her around the corner of that boiler room. There’s actually a blood trail that continues past the walker and goes around the corner.
Some of the little touches we added was there was bits of hair in its mouth and hair in his hand when it reaches up towards Rick. And it was just one of those things that we really wanted to show that this thing had feasted on her, as horrible as it is."
He went on to mention that they didn't want seeing her eaten body to take away from the impact of her death in the previous episode:
Greg Nicotero: "We didn't want to take away from [her death]. The interesting thing about T-Dog’s death in episode four was it was really heroic. We really went to great lengths to make sure that his death had meaning and her death also had meaning. It was important to Sarah [Wayne Callies] that the baby survived and was one of the first things that came up when the idea of her death was discussed.
In keeping the emotional resonance of Lori's death, there are some boundaries. You may not believe it, but there are a few boundaries here and there on The Walking Dead that we want to preserve."
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Why Didn't Daryl Talk More About Carol?: With Daryl and Carol being so close, we were surprised that the episode didn't spend more time with him discussing her death. So much went on at the Prison and Woodbury this episode, and we discovered that there were extra scenes with Daryl on the cutting room floor:
Greg Nicotero: "One of the things about this episode is that it’s really dense. There’s so much material to talk about and there was one scene we shot that I love and sadly didn’t make the final cut.
Daryl and Maggie are driving to the daycare and the road is blocked by an overturned tree, so they stop. Maggie starts to break down and Daryl says "was she dead?" Daryl doesn’t know what happened Lori, and Maggie says that she had to cut her open.
Then Maggie looks at Daryl and she says "oh my God, I’m so sorry about Carol" and the look on his face is like he got punched in the stomach. He says that baby gave her so much hope. Carol’s death really pushes Daryl forward, and unfortunately, it’s not in the episode, but hopefully it’ll be on the DVD."
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We have more Walking Dead-related content coming your way this weekend, including my interview with Vincent Ward (Oscar), who talked to me about this experience as one of the new cast members on the show. To catch up on our recent coverage of The Walking Dead Season 3, visit the following articles:
Daily Dead's Official Podcast! Daily Dead's Official Podcast!
