The Walking Dead: Ranking Every Season From Worst To Best

7. Season 7 (2016-17)

A joyless slog from start to finish, season 7 was hurt badly by an underwhelming antagonist and the sidelining of the show’s best characters. Negan’s introduction at the end of season 6 immediately started the character off on the wrong foot with audiences, killing an unidentified character in one of the cheapest cliff hangers in recent memory.

He failed from then on to endear himself as a villain, quite literally a cartoon character devoid of added dimensions or depth, and one who endlessly repeated the same tired speeches of superiority while stroking his barbed Lucille episode after episode. With Carol mostly inactive, Daryl imprisoned for the first half, and Morgan mired in a tedious arc of shattered pacifism, the show felt too fractured, with too few moments of heart to make all the misery bearable.

The whole season was built around first setting up and then delivering on Rick’s call to arms, and an eventual rebellion by several clans against Negan and his Saviors, but was paced so sluggishly, in such a dull manner, that the climax failed to achieve any real sense of catharsis or even anticipation for next year. When an entire season so ponderously sets the pieces on the board, it’s hard to feel much excitement for the game that’s coming.

The hope is that the past year was a necessary evil that moved everything into place for an intense arc of war next season, but that in itself does nothing to make season 7 one that fans are eager to revisit.

Best Episode: New Best Friends - Thrusting Rick into a gladiator duel with a spike-armoured walker in a pit of trash provided a touch of much needed pulp and popcorn entertainment for a season sorely lacking in creative moments.

Worst Episode: The Day Will Come When You Won’t Be - When the season premiere revealed Negan to have gruesomely murdered first Abraham and then Glenn, it set an unwelcomely nihilistic tone of sadism and brutality for a season that largely persisted in its bleakness throughout the year. The promise of hope followed by its cruel withdrawal had been repeated time and time again even before this season, and this was a low point.