The Walking Dead Season 4 Finale: 8 Ways It Can Avoid Sucking
8. Introduce An Antagonist (That Isn't Just The Walkers)
Zombies of any kind - especially the ones on this series - have a serious problem: they lack focus. While the first season could get by with the Walkers as the primary antagonists, by the time the second season rolled around, the writers of The Walking Dead realized that they need a more active threat than just hordes of shambling corpses. Their run since then has been spotty, mostly providing ambiguously evil people to cross the paths of our main characters in order to show how far human desperation can go. But since the climactic prison battle of the midseason finale, the Walking Dead has felt rather... directionless. The primary reason for this is the distinct lack of a central antagonist the most we have gotten so far is that car that kidnapped Beth and the solitary jerk amongst the redneck gang (both in Daryl's story!). While they still have their threatening moments, Walkers can no longer sustain the same dramatic tension an actual antagonist like the Governor or even the Virus from earlier this season could. What the show needs is an active threat of some kind to bring urgency to this season's conclusion - perhaps they are going for double trouble with both Terminus and the Redneck gang pursuing Rick. Only time will tell.
Self-evidently a man who writes for the Internet, Robert also writes films, plays, teleplays, and short stories when he's not working on a movie set somewhere. He lives somewhere behind the Hollywood sign.
