The Walking Dead: Welcome to the Tombs – Andrea’s Time to Shine (and Die)

Walking Dead’s 3rd season fanile killed off a major character.  Let’s look at Andrea’s death!  Why’d she have to die?

In this life now you kill or you die. Or you die and you kill. 

– The Governor

A dental -chair can be scary thing, even at the best of times. However, add the Governor into the mix and it takes on far more sinister dimensions. This is where Walking Dead‘s season 3 finale begins, and it almost seems inevitable that Andrea would face such a fate. After all, she was sort of a virtuous character at times, yet lived recklessly at others. It makes sense that her tangled web of a life would finally trap her.

In this case, she wanted too much for the Governor to be someone different–  more humane, more understanding, and a peacemaker. What made sense to Andrea does not compute with him. As Mortica Addams put it: “What is normal for the spider is chaos for the fly.”

In the Governor’s mind, everyone around him was betraying him, making him weak, setting him up to fall. It’s not just Rick and the prison, but anyone with links to that world. It’s not just Andrea and Michonne, but it was Milton. Everyone was out to get him, or otherwise let him down, and everyone was potentially expendable to his vision (as we saw in his gun rampage by episode’s end).

This is why, instead of just killing Andrea outright, the Governor decided to let the reanimated corpse of Milton do it. Sure, the Governor may have a sadistic streak, but the character likely sought the poetic justice of it more than satisfying his bloodlust. After all, the Governor actually leaves Andrea to her devices, her fate. It’s almost as if he needed to walk away from her, to make her feel like her death would’t even matter. It’s truly an insight into his character (or lack thereof, depending on your point of view).

To Remember Andrea is to Remember Season 3

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In many ways, Andrea made season 3. Even though her character never got what she wanted, her drive and determination to seek a better world makes her one of the season’s — and one of the Walking Dead’s — most memorable characters. Like Dale, she tried to be a moral center, and rarely faltered. If anything, her flaw was in being too genuine, too sincere in her quest to bring peace between warring camps.

She also repeatedly denied herself successful assassination attempts against the Governor, who she recognized as a burgeoning threat to the prison and Woodbury. In other words, she wasn’t willing to compromise her principles and valued human life. She had hope for compromise, and was willing to explore every last avenue as an alternative to warfare.

Did this make Andrea naïve? To an extent, maybe. However, it did make her right. It’s the classic theme of a character doing the right thing but with the wrong result. Her failure was more than just that, though, if one thinks about it. It did alter the course of the show, and Walking Dead fans tended to mourn her loss — and not just because her character lived on in the comic book.

What do you think?  Do you miss Andrea?  Let us know in the comments!