How to save the Walking Dead

The Walking Dead needs to ramp it up in season 4 to keep us watching. And here's 6 ways they can do it -

 

 

1. Flesh out the characters - 27 characters died in the season finale, but apart from Andrea and maybe Milton, did we actually care? Nope. Why? Because we didn't know these people, so how could we care about them? And, in the case of Andrea a lot of us had little sympathy because we found the way the writers developed her character unrealistic and even irritating.

2. We need more Daryl - Let's be honest here, Norman Reedus is the star of the show. He wasn't meant to be, but he is. Yet the Governor effectively kills his brother Merle and he doesn't hunt him down and turn up at the prison with the Governor's head on a stick? Rubbish. They need to stay true to the character.

3. Stop ruining female characters by turning them into unrealistic victims like Carol (battered wife, dead daughter), loose women like Lori and gullible idiots like Andrea (the old Andrea would have killed the Governor, not fawned over him like a love struck teenager). Only Michonne has kicked ass without any of the melodrama.

4. Do something interesting with the Governor or kill him off. For me, every time the action went to Woodbury the show dragged to a crawl. After the initial shock over him keeping his walker daughter and the heads, the Governor character disappointed.

 

5. We need more shocks. It was a shock when Merle died and when the Governor gunned down his own people, but apart from that there weren't enough shocks. Predictably, everybody at the prison survived.

 

If you can bare to watch it, here's the bit where Daryl finds Merle the zombie.
 

 

 

 

6. Up the walker threat. The reason folk love the show is because it's about zombies. But too much of the time in season 3 they were a sideshow. They need to pose more of a threat, to evolve, get stronger. TWD is primarily a zombie show, the writers shouldn't forget that.