The Walking Dead: Ranking Every Season From Worst To Best

The epitome of hate-watching for many, season 2 had a massive audience, but a large portion of highly vocal detractors. Criticism was in many ways well justified as the second season established the show’s typical pattern of “the group finds a safe location, stays there all season, then leaves after it’s violently compromised”.

In this case, Hershel’s Farm was the chosen site for characters who hadn’t yet been given a whole lot of depth to mostly sit around meditating on civilisation and morality, and engaging in soap opera storylines. The search for Carol’s lost daughter Sophia was largely responsible for both the characters and story stalling with the entire first half dedicated to one fruitless hunt after another.

The season was also marred by stunning ineptitude and incompetence from its characters in a year that featured Andrea accidentally shooting at Daryl with a sniper rifle, Carl taunting and then running away from a walker which went on to kill Dale, and Lori managing to overturn her car whilst driving in a straight line. If not for a few strong sequences and moments, mostly in the second half of the season and usually involving Shane (RIP) and his boiling conflict with Rick, season 2 would be nigh on unsalvageable.

Best Episode: Pretty Much Dead Already - For all its faults, the Sophia arc paid off in devastating fashion as we discover to the shock of all that she had been killed and turned long before, stored in Hershel’s barn with a host of other walkers that Hershel’s family had foolishly hoped to heal. Even the most cynical of viewers would be hard pressed not to find that shot of Sophia’s shambling emergence from the barn chillingly effective.

Worst Episode: Chupacabra - In which Glenn pouts for the entire hour, and Daryl hallucinates (that beloved TV trope!) the return of his thought-dead brother Merle. He’s later mistaken for a walker despite being surrounded by people that are visibly not walkers, and shot by a witless Andrea in one of the most maddening moments of the show.