!!!SPOILERS FOR THE WALKING DEAD SEASON 3 FINALE BELOW!!!

It’s hard to tell what the writers and producers of The Walking Dead hate more: the audience, the characters, the comics or the show itself. In this week’s season three finale, they made it clear that we, the audience, are at least pretty high on the hate list. After another season of languishing plot and pacing so slow that it often moved in reverse (seriously, this season was all about story archs moving forward in one episode just to be totally set back in the next), we were presented with a season finale that contained 2, maybe 3 satisfying moments amidst an hour of vamping and build up for climaxes that would never come.

I know the show’s internal workings are troubled. You can’t have a totally stellar first season, then continually fire showrunner after showrunner while the network tightens the budget yet demands more episodes and not expect the quality to decline. The latter of those problems was ESPECIALLY evident in seasons 2 and 3 when nearly every other episode seemed to just be the prelude to the next episode. Either they really aren’t being given the funding and network support to write, and produce 10 or 13 episodes a season or they simply do not understand the purpose of a short season at all.

In a show like LOST (in the early seasons) or BSG (in the latter seasons) where you have 26 episodes a season, it’s fair to expect a few place holder episodes. Yet with barely a baker’s dozen hours to fill a year, The Walking Dead spent all of season two standing around and arguing about secrets and feelings on a farm and all of season three with our heroes considering leaving the prison, considering attacking Woodbury and considering getting rid of or keeping various newcomers. Both seasons were big on debate and internal (often unspoken) conflict and light on… doing… much of anything. With a short season show, the ENTIRE story and all major plot points need to be mapped out ahead of time so that the action, drama, humor, gore, etc can be evenly split among the episodes. I can’t wrap my head around the creative or financial impetus of “give ’em one good one, 2 bad ones, a kind ok one, an infuriatingly bad one, then repeat.”

Now, with the finale of season 3, The Walking Dead has robbed its fans of any type of resolution regarding The Governor, or the prison and given us no indication of what to look forward two next season other than possibly the REST of season 3’s plot and some fond time’s in Uncle Rick’s Lockdown Nursery and Retirement Village. And despite that fact that THE ONLY THING I was looking forward to in the finale was seeing Michonne take The Governor’s other eye just before Andrea put that pocket knife elbow deep in his heart, the producers elected to elevate The Governor to the role of Jason Vorhees-esque, unkillable boogie man and make him a series regular next season.

I don’t know, guys. I might be out. The only plot element I liked about the finale was Carl… which I will address in the next comic.

COMMENTERS: That season finale was fucking bullshit, right? Spoilers away. Tell me how you feel.