'Walking Dead' Watch: Bad CGI and Season-Low Ratings

The most active buzz around this week's episode of The Walking Dead concerns a particularly terrible CGI rendition of a deer, but the week also delivered some more bad new for the series. Ratings for TWD sank to a new season-low mark this week, and the show's audience is now nearly the smallest its been since its second season.

In a now notorious scene in this week's episode, Rick takes a break from zombie killing to consider shooting a deer. The sub-par digital rendering of the animal is of such low quality, social media immediately lit up with complaints from viewers who thought they deserved better.

If there's a bright spot for the show's producers, it's that relatively few people saw the terrible visual effects. Total viewership for the episode was 10.1 million, setting a new low point for the season and re-establishing the pattern of week-to-week declines that plagued the first half of the season.

Perhaps more significantly, the episode turned in lower ratings than all but three episodes in season three. To this point, it looked as if the series' ratings might be stabilizing around the level it enjoyed during the second half of that season, but the continued ratings declines are now threatening to put the series in territory it's not been in for a very long time. Not since 2012 has total viewership of TWD fallen below 10 million, but this week the series came within a hair's breadth of seeing it happen again.