The Walking Dead Season 4 Finale: 8 Ways It Can Avoid Sucking

6. Make The Supporting Characters Matter

The Walking Dead has always had a hit-and-miss record with supporting characters. At their best, they show the various ways in which many different types of people are affected by this Zombie Apocalypse, at their worst they end up simply creating more Walker-bait; the Walking Dead equivalent of redshirts (brownish green shirts, maybe? Not quite as catchy...). The latter is most obvious is season 3, when a plethora of minor characters got next to no development and then got killed in subsequent gunfights or Walker attacks, to no one's surprise. If there was anything that the second half of season 4 was unafraid of, it was introducing a brand new batch of supporting characters. Until this point, they've mostly functioned as quirky side characters than anything else, given that despite their involvement with the leads, people like the Redneck Gang Daryl finds himself with and the Washington-bound Trio (pictured) haven't yet been put in the same kind of peril as the central characters. The season finale bears the burden of having to justify their existence €“ either dramatically, plot-related, or (ideally) both. It may be a stretch to make the audience care about these people as much as the lead characters, but if they don't contribute to the finale, their prior development is just wasted screen time.