If early episodes are any indication, Season 3 will provide a glorious payoff for those EST-ian weeks down on the farm. The action opens months later, which we see almost immediately from the size of Lori's pregnant belly and, more important, the air of grim resignation that has fallen over the troops.
Finally discovering the prison we saw on the horizon in the finale (it's not clear what took them so long), Rick and friends set about taking out the zombies "living" there with a methodical ferocity that makes slaughter look like factory work. Because that is what it has become.
Any thought that the plague will run its course or that the walkers will die of starvation is gone; killing zombies is just part of life, like scavenging for food and keeping the water supply uncontaminated. Love and hope may still bloom, but the only sense of humor left on the planet appears to belong to Daryl (Norman Reedus), whose job seems to be preserving these important parts of humanity in the same way Irish monks preserved writing during the Dark Ages.
