Spoilers for "Welcome to the Tombs" within. You've been warned.

It's hard to believe it, but The Walking Dead: Season 3 is already over. With another death-ridden season finale under its belt, we're once again going head-first into new territory with Rick and the gang.

We caught up with series creator/executive producer Robert Kirkman for his take on the Season 3 finale and some teases for Season 4.

Read IGN TV's Review of "Welcome to the Tombs"

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[laughs] Well that’s good, I guess!That was something that was decided fairly early on. We didn’t go into the season knowing that we were going to do that, but it’s something that came together as we continued developing the Woodbury arc.I definitely do. I think it’s important to note that I don’t believe for a minute that Rick would have accepted the people of Woodbury into the prison and unified those communities as he has at the end of this season if it weren’t for Andrea and all of the work she did toward that goal. I think to a certain extent, Andrea as a character accomplished the very difficult task that she was trying to accomplish, but did it in a way that ended up costing her life. Which is tragic, but that’s kind of par for the course with The Walking Dead.It’s really hard for the audience to judge whether or not a character death was worth it, just because I think the main deciding factor of whether or not to kill a character is what comes out of that death. What story elements, what changes to our overall storytelling, what differences in characters, and things like that come out of having that character not be around and having those characters lose that other character.In the case of Milton, Andrea, Merle, Lori, and everybody that we lost this season, it’s all about moving these characters forward and where we go from here. Often times, the audience doesn’t really know where we’re going from here, so it’s kind of hard to see that death was necessary or at least valuable. But we know what we’re doing!

I think that could definitely change. It’s not necessary to kill a character off in a finale; we certainly don’t want to be in some sort of a recognizable cycle. But the finales are usually big episodes and I guess big episodes of The Walking Dead usually mean big deaths. By design, it’s something that I would expect to happen frequently, but I don’t think that you have to have a big death to have a big or memorable moment.It seems to have worked out that way thus far, but we’re certainly never in the writer’s room going, “Oh, we’ve got to kill somebody episode! We haven’t killed anybody in a long time!” It’s something that pretty much flows organically. We’re working out Season 4 right now – we’re halfway through writing it – and we know exactly where we’re going. Who’s dying and when they’re dying is all worked out very early on as we’re plotting out the entire season. It’s something that we always know where we’re going with it.Yeah, he’s still very much in the mix. That’s certainly not the last that we’ll see of him. When we see him again and where we see him again, that’s the big question. It’s not going to be like it was in Season 3; it’s not going to be Rick and the Governor on a collision course with a conflict between them. He’ll be used in very different ways next season.Rick has had a success. The people at the prison have survived this conflict with the Governor, he brought people from Woodbury into the prison, and he’s kind of had this big win. He’s had this moment where he’s brought people together and he’s doing good things. But he’s had this tremendous loss in that Carl has lost this piece of his humanity. This has been Rick’s main mission throughout the show, to protect his family. We’ve seen two very big failures on that front this season.Moving into next season, we’re going to see a very different Rick, but one of his main goals is to manage this situation with Carl and see if he can bring him back from this darkness that’s crept into him. Whether or not he’s able to do that, we’ll have to see. But this is a big change in the character of Carl, but it’s something that’s going to be weighing heavily on Rick next season.

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Yeah, I think that really is something that comic book fans can use to kind of draw out some information on where we might be going with Season 4. Now that these two characters are together and are on the same side, we will see a little bit more of that comic book relationship that fans are familiar with creeping into the show.A bigger group brings with it bigger problems. They are certainly going to need a lot more resources, and they already have a lot of rebuilding to do, just from the things that happened in this battle between Woodbury and the prison. I don’t think there’s going to be a shortage of conflict and danger coming into the fourth season, despite the fact that they are still in the prison.I’ll say that there are a lot of familiar elements that are remaining. Michonne is still around, Rick and his group are still in the prison, the Governor’s still out there… so there are a lot of things that are carrying over from Season 3 to Season 4, but I can’t stress how different things are going to be.There are going to be some radical changes to those elements that are going to bring in a lot of new storytelling. While [Season 4] does seem somewhat familiar, it’s going to be vastly different from Season 3.

Joey is a Senior Editor at IGN and a comic book creator. Follow Joey on Twitter @JoeyEsposito , or find him on IGN at Joey-IGN . If he could, he'd run away to live amongst wild cats for the rest of his days.