My colleague Mike Ryan is recapping 'The Walking Dead' here, and I highly recommend his weekly reviews, but I thought I'd offer a few thoughts on the show's second season below.

By the second half of 'The Walking Dead's' Sunday mid-season finale, I was actively rooting for the zombies.

Say what you will about the flesh-eaters, they know what they want and they briskly go for it. On an increasingly frustrating show that can't quite decide whether it wants to be a character-driven drama or a well-crafted frightfest, the zombies' lack of ambiguity about what they want has been almost refreshing at times.

I'm guessing it wasn't the intention of the show's writers to make me hope that Rick Grimes' crew would be munched by the undead, but too often this season, the humans on the show have been idiotic, annoying or sanctimonious -- sometimes all three. The time spent on Hershel Greene's farm was often a waste, not just of time but of the relatively sturdy momentum the show had cranked up in its short first season.

It didn't have to be this way. I'm betting the group's rural interlude was, at least in part, supposed to get us to care about the show's characters more deeply. But most of the characters were badly served by increasingly ham-fisted attempts at characterizations that merely repeated information we already had. The final scene of the episode was moving (all hail director Michelle MacLaren), but almost every other development made me want to bite someone myself.