The Walking Dead: Ranking Every Season From Worst To Best

New showrunner Scott Gimple wasted no time in disposing of the riffraff accumulated by the Woodbury storyline in his predecessor’s season 3, by way of a fatal infection that swept through the prison, both cleaning the show of superfluous characters and also giving existing heroes to show just how far they’ve come in this world.

At the same time, the season brought into the fold compelling new players such as Abraham, Eugene, Bob and Tara, while greatly improving the presence of Tyreese and Sasha, all of whom together would come to solidify the spine of the cast for the next few years.

The midseason finale left devastation in its wake, bringing to an end the storylines of both the prison and The Governor, and scattering the cast across the map, left to fend for themselves in small groups separate paths. The season’s willingness to show individual stories especially paid off in the second half as the scattered cast slowly converged and reunited in the journey towards apparent sanctuary Terminus, but this episodic structure also produced a few duds at times, especially in its failed attempts to humanise The Governor.

Nonetheless, this is a strong and consistent season with several clear highlights of the show, and one that improved the depth of the cast, provided emotional gut punches by the cartload, and tested our heroes to surpass their previous limits.

Best Episode: Too Far Gone - Narrowly pipping A and The Grove for the title, the midseason finale violently shatters the status quo and uses the entire cast well in a bloody do over of season 3’s aborted prison assault. The Governor is finally vanquished but only after his devastating execution of Hershel, which causes all hell to break loose in a blinding cloud of vengeance which ultimately scatters the cast to the wind. Also, Daryl blows up a tank by himself. What more needs to be said?

Worst Episode: Live Bait - The first of the Governor-centric episodes begins to fulfil a necessary evil in setting up round two of his attack on Rick and company but never really manages to convince the audience that he's truly turned a new leaf, as it initially tries to suggest. He’d return to his psychopathic ways in only the next episode, and untrusting viewers simply spend this first instalment waiting for the shoe to drop, following a character we’ve no reason to feel attached to. As such, his supposedly redemptive scenes with a family of survivors fall flat, and outside of introducing Tara to the show, it’s ultimately a waste of time.