(CNN) The following contains spoilers about "The Walking Dead's" Feb. 25 midseason premiere.

The Walking Dead " has been an ambling shadow of itself, at times feeling as if the series -- immersed in a wartime footing -- has drifted away from the attributes that made it such a breakaway hit.

The midseason premiere, which featured a major character death, seemed to put the show back in surer, certainly more emotional territory, while again ending on the sort of cryptic note that simultaneously felt intriguing and possibly like another in a series of irritating head games.

Having been bitten at the end of the last batch of episodes, Carl (Chandler Riggs), the son of main character Rick (Andrew Lincoln), gradually met his end. Carl's slow-motion demise contained a sense of warmth, sentimentality and loss that has sometimes gone missing from the show, due in part to its seeming determination to shock and tease.

Part of those impulses were still on display, in the form of a bloody disembowelment. Nobody expects a zombie series to be for the faint of heart, but under producer Scott M. Gimple, "The Walking Dead" has periodically tripped over the line that distinguishes edgy from cheap and gratuitous.

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