The show gets even meaner and tougher. We hardly see any zombies. Instead, we have a prison full of hard bastard inmates who survived the zombie holocaust and are about to escape because their chief warden is too trusting. (Asuha Niiyama, played by Tina Tamashiro.) They're seriously bad news. Most people won't survive to the end of the season.

Even the show's hero has turned bad. For three seasons, we've followed, trusted and liked him... but now he's lost almost everyone, including his baby daughter. Her name's Mirai and the worst thing, paradoxically, is that she's not dead. Thus her beaten-up, somewhat unhinged father is looking for her, which might sound admirable until you see what he's willing to sacrifice. He's gone off the deep end. He's as scary as anyone here and he'll kill as casually as those convicts. He's also frighteningly tough.

Everyone wants to go to Utopia. They assume from its name that it's safe and wonderful, knowing nothing about it, and you'll see torture with pliers and fingernails because people want to know its location. When we actually find it... whoah. Why the guaranteed bloodbath admissions procedure? Haven't these people realised that numbers are necessary for long-term survival? Or have they stopped caring about long-term survival? What's their game? What are they trying to do? I didn't trust these guys an inch and I was already expecting the worst from them in Season 5.

The nicest person here is responsible for a bloodbath, because it's her fault the inmates escaped. Curiously, Ayami Nakajo (earlier seasons) was half-British and now her sort-of-replacement Tina Tamashiro is half-American.

We're approaching the end. After this, there's only the FINAL movie and the "almost everyone we knew is gone" Season 5. Only one cast member lasted through all five seasons and it's no one you'd have predicted. Season 4 is hard as nails, e.g. Asuha Niiyama's dutiful subordinate is a bastard who'll keep hitting a helpless man even when ordered to stop... and that's this season's idea of a good guy. The finale has terrifying things to say about gender relations and giving power to the powerless. (When I say "power", I mean "guns".) This has been an impressive show.