Originally written March 30, 2014

Season 4 of The Walking Dead was a strange breed for me. I will say I started reading the comic during this season, so sometimes when a big moment would happen in the show, I had already experienced it in the comic and there wasn’t as much shock value as there was for things in seasons 1-3 for me. So I try to keep that in mind when judging the show now. Still, the show makes many deviations from the comic, so it’s hard to know when it’s going to follow it closely and when it’s going to do something different.

That being said, considering this is the show’s fourth season, it’s at the point where talking about and reviewing plot details is difficult because you either have no idea what I’m talking about if you don’t watch it and don’t plan to, or if you do plan to I don’t want to spoil too much. But basically, the way season 4 starts out is that the group is still at the prison they made a home in in season 3, now with a lot more people. They’ve built a community, and their strength in numbers is helping them survive the apocalypse. However, soon a disease starts spreading throughout the prison, and it’s taking many lives. A lot more happens after this point throughout the season, but like I said it’s giving away too much if you’re not caught up, or it won’t mean much if you don’t watch.

I found season 4 to be very character focused, especially in its second half. This is an advantage the show gets to have ever since it started having 16 episodes per season instead of the lower amounts in seasons 1 and 2. This season especially sometimes spends a whole episode on just a few characters of the group. Rick, who was always considered the main character, is actually not even in 6 episodes this season, because the ones he’s not in were focused on other members of the cast instead.

I find these character-focused episodes both benefit and hurt the show. It’s great because these kinds of episodes are much more personal, spending time with individual characters to show how they’re emotionally handling everything, digging deeper into their psyches and backstories. I like that aspect of it a lot. But it hurts because it really slows the show down sometimes. I found sometimes after a whole episode the plot of the show really didn’t advance all that much. It can sometimes just make it feel like the show is dragging.

All around though, this was another great season of The Walking Dead. It has everything you’d expect from it. There’s the personal moments, the highly emotional moments, major character deaths, intense moments, action scenes, gory zombie kills, human drama, etc. It succeeds pretty well on delivering all of these, only struggling to find the right balance in a few spots. It was quite a polarizing season, as I’ve heard many people both love it and hate it. I understand both sides. All around, I’m still enjoying the show a lot, and its ending made me really excited for the next season.

4/5