The Walking Dead: Ranking Every Season From Worst To Best

Year six also began with a strong run of high-octane pulp action, finding bolder, bloodier ways to balance the mounting zombie hazard with the arguably even greater dangers posed by the living.

By this point, the show knew the strengths of its better characters in Carol, Daryl, and the freshly returned Morgan, and kept them central to a story that set our battle-hardened heroes against two enemy groups that truly showed the depravity of humanity’s baser instincts when unchecked and ungoverned by law and morality: one feral, one meticulously organised, both savagely relentless.

In dealing with these threats, however, the series frequently made poor use of its now unwieldy cast, with an abundance of superfluous characters in the Alexandria community mostly used as redshirts, and the introduction of the Hilltop group as a counter to Negan’s villainous Saviors stretched the ungainly cast far too thin.

In addition, the show began to overindulge in cheap gimmicks and manipulative stunts as the plot armour given to the main players became more and more obvious, with both Glenn and Daryl the subject of cliffhangers that teased their fates even before the now infamous POV shot in the finale which cynically and lazily left the identity of Lucille’s victim a mystery.

Best Episode: Here’s Not Here - The sanctity of life and the question of the lengths one should go to in order to survive was prominently examined over the course of the year by two of the show’s best characters in Morgan and Carol, and this sequel to season 3’s “Clear” provides a poignant and deftly conceived origin story for Morgan’s newfound mantra of pacifism. Operating as a two-man morality play with an excellent guest star, it’s a fantastic example of how good the show can be when it experiments with form.

Worst Episode: Last Day on Earth - I’ve wailed on Negan and his Saviors a lot already, but we need to do a little more as the season 6 finale is bound to go down as an all-time low. A massively bloated running time is wasted by tedium and storytelling repetitions as we wait, and wait, and wait for Negan to show up before he finally graces us with a horrendously written monologue and an insultingly gratuitous cliffhanger. At least The Governor never mentioned “pee pee pants.”