The Walking Dead Season 9: 4 Ups & 1 Down From ‘The Calm Before’

3. It's Unpredictable

At one stage early on its run, The Walking Dead had a similar sort of reputation to that of Game Of Thrones, whereby the writers had no fear in killing off some of the show's biggest characters for the betterment of the narrative.

Unfortunately, the series lost this reputation somewhere along the line. Instead, we were seeing characters that could've gone further being killed off for shock value, while others that serve little purpose to the narrative were kept around for no reason other than how long their respective actor had been on the show.

If The Calm Before proves anything, it's that this is no longer an issue for the writers. Once again, they're daring to be bold. Characters like Tara and Enid may have once served a purpose to the show, but with an already bloated cast being populated with more and more newcomers, their roles within the series have become less substantial.

As The Kingdom's fair - and the subsequent massacre - is a pretty big storyline in the comics, some fans would've had their predictions about who's heads would end up on a spike, but it's fair to assume that nobody thought the show would dare to axe so many of its main characters in one fell swoop. But, alas, it did - and as a result, the series once again became unpredictable.