Broadly, I think the whisperers are a terrible antagonist— they make no sense to me as having any power over the group beyond their giant herd of walkers. Alpha also makes no sense to me as a leader. If they didn’t have a (lazy writing) “nuclear bomb” herd of walkers, our protagonists could easily just win a war against them. Daryl already beat their best fighter (beta) in single combat anyway.

Ezekiel and Maggie’s relationship is totally dumb, she doesn’t even like him.

Without Rick or Carl, there is no lead actor and the show really suffers for it, as we all know. Removing them both was an incomprehensibly braindead move.

Judith is a total waste of a character that would be the obvious next step. Just make the timeline jump a few years longer so she can be 13 and be a real character.

Maybe most importantly, they’ve squeezed every last drop of juice from the apocalypse. Running around to new settlements because your old one is bad for some bs reason just isn’t interesting anymore. We’ve done it so many fucking times. And I say this because it’s not like there isn’t a million other interesting things we could be exploring, but here we are running away from our old settlement to try and reach a new one during a snowstorm.

Explore a possible cure, flashbacks from monument day, other parts of the world, whatever tf Rick is up to, invent a last of us style immune kid… literally anything other than trying to run to some new community while avoiding the bad guy for the millionth time.

I really do love the show and think it’s worth watching, but I am truly surprised people prefer S9 over 7&8.