7. There's An Actual, Proper Bad Guy Going For Broke
The Governor has been a breath of fresh air on the show. Woodbury's former mayor/despot came to the party as the first proper antagonist the show had, replacing the will-he-wont-he moral hodgepodge that was Shane Walsh with someone who had a set of balls intact and didn't mind engaging in wild, random acts of violence without all the woe-is-me lead-up and aftermath. Add this to the fact that his season 3 arc saw him go from awful-but-understandable in his reasoning to I'm-just-gonna-mow-down everything come the close, and we got to see Walking Dead give us a glorious villain. So what does he do in season 4? More of the same, that's what. We know now that the Governor is pretty much by himself though he'll probably have some loyal, un-shot lieutenants for company and is harassing the prison guerrilla-style with attacks from inside and fence sabotage outside. He's now fully-blown antagonist, rather than on the opposite of end of Rick's morally grey spectrum, meaning that for the first time ever, Walking Dead will be able to engage with a clear-cut villain, and focus the drama on the varying way the group reacts to this threat (read: violence, or where Carl's concerned, ultraviolence). Frankly, the zombies really aren't much of threat on this show anymore, and the crew deserve special praise for making that apparent. Oh sure, they're still dangerous, but while series one and two were more concerned with surviving their onslaught without losing your mind, the third took on the more comic-faithful tone of making humans the real enemy. So in this vein, it'll be nice to make this theme more apparent with the ever-more batsh*t insane Governor, who with his daughter and town gone really doesn't need a pretense for violence anymore. If nothing else, it'll be cool to see the reliably excellent David Morrissey cut loose.