The Walking Dead returned on Sunday night for its third season, and returned to its roots. By which I mean: Killing zombies. After a season spent largely squandered by debates about morality and the frailty of human existence, with lots of maundering soul-searching, The Walking Dead needed to realign itself. Similarly, viewers -- including me -- need to shake off the idea that there should be deeper character development. Just because it's on AMC doesn't mean it's of Breaking Bad or Mad Men quality. We have to take The Walking Dead on its own terms. And those terms are, I repeat: Killing zombies. Director Ernest Dickerson, working from a script by Glen Mazzara, filmed our doughty band of heroes shooting, stabbing, eye-gouging, and head-squirting their way through reams of zombies, to arrive at what looked, initially, like an abandoned prison. It wasn't -- zombies are like roaches, they creep into any damp space -- but they battled their way into the left-for-the-dead penitentiary. Dickerson, who began his career as a superb cinematographer ( Do the Right Thing, The Brother from Another Planet ), is a wonderful TV director, able to bring out lush colors and a kinetic energy to shows as various as The Wire, Dexter, and Lincoln Heights. In the premiere, Dickerson, who also directed four episodes of Dead last season, conveyed the claustrophobia required of any good Dead episode -- that feeling of dread you share with the human protagonists as the zombies just... keep... on... comingggg ...