At one point in time, 17 million people had their eyes locked on their television sets for “The Walking Dead,“ but those days are now long behind us. The ratings have been steadily declining for the past few years, and despite a slight uptick for the mid-season premiere earlier this month, the bad news continues as the AMC series has hit a new all-time low.

This past Sunday night’s ‘Omega,’ a damn good episode in a season that has *mostly* been delivering the goods thus far, was watched by 4.5 million total viewers, down quite a bit from the 5.2 million viewers who watched Season 9’s mid-season premiere. The previous low for the current ninth season came when 4.8 million tuned in for the seventh episode.

For the sake of comparison, here are the episode-by-episode numbers for Season 9:

• Episode 9.1 – 6.08 million
• Episode 9.2 – 4.95 million
• Episode 9.3 – 5.04 million
• Episode 9.4 – 5.10 million
• Episode 9.5 *Rick’s Final Episode* – 5.41 million
• Episode 9.6 – 5.4 million
• Episode 9.7 – 4.8 million
• Episode 9.8 *Mid-Season Finale* – 5.1 million
• Episode 9.9 *Mid-Season Premiere* – 5.2 million
• Episode 9.10 – 4.5 million 

Prior to ‘Omega’ this past Sunday night, the all-time lowest rated episode of “The Walking Dead” was during the show’s infancy, when 4.7 million watched its second ever episode.

AMC has already ordered up a tenth season of “The Walking Dead” that’ll air later this year, but it would seem that the show’s future beyond that is very much uncertain.