Walking Dead Season 3 Episode 8: Mid-Season Finale Ignites War, Episode 9 Trailer

Forget palpable tension and spurts of gory violence. The mid-season finale of "The Walking Dead" was an all out war.

"The show just surprises me and brutalizes me," said star Andrew Lincoln (Rick Grimes) to AMC in a recent interview.

"I was just talking to Scott Wilson [Hershel], and we were just riffing on how extraordinary this show is. The only downer is the fact that we lose people. You make these incredibly brilliant and intense relationships with truly gifted actors and invariably they get bitten, and I have to kill them. And it is kind of the big downer on what is becoming the single greatest job of my career. In the space of three years I've done more gymnastics on this show then I have in probably four or five years. It's been an incredible journey, and I wouldn't change it for the world, although it would have been nice to have a couple of more seasons with Sarah [Wayne Callies]," Andrew Lincoln said to AMC.

Based off the monthly black-and-white comic book series written by creator Robert Kirkman, "The Walking Dead" follows a gang of lost souls just trying to survive day-to-day life in a post-apocalyptic U.S. overrun with the living dead. The show is striking its own path in season three, deviating freely from the narrative in the comics, but still incorporating much of the source material.

Showrunner Glen Mazzara recently sat down with Entertainment Weekly to discuss where the rest of season three is headed.

"We're on the road to war," Mazzara said. "Now that everything is set up, now people have to make choices. Andrea becomes the focal point. She's the connective tissue. She has to make choices about how she's going to deal with this. She's caught between a rock and a hard place and she has to make choices to pick one side or the other or bring the groups together. We now have Merle, who obviously cannot live with Rick because Rick was the one who handcuffed him to the roof, and there's Daryl. So in both groups, everything starts splitting apart. Everybody forms different alliances."

Chilling words, for sure. But Mazzara says even more conflict - especially within the two different groups themselves - is to come.

"Even the Glenn and Maggie relationship is put into disarray because of what transpired in Woodbury and what Glen thinks maybe happened and what actually did happen. Everybody's traumatized at this point. Everybody's at their weakest point, and now that have to start challenging each other and building each other up. And meanwhile, the two groups are gearing up for war."

Mazzarra promises the rest of season three is just as visceral and unpredictable as the first eight episodes.

"I'm very proud of the second half of the season," Mazarra continued. "It's just as intense as the first half. There's one episode in the middle of the run that feels like a finale and has just as much as action as you've seen here in this. We are just charging straight ahead. It doesn't slow down. It doesn't get softer."

Season three will resume with episode nine, "The Suicide King," on Sunday, Feb. 10, 2013 at 9 p.m. EST.