The Walking Dead: Ranking Every Season From Worst To Best

The show’s fifth year is its best, with the first few episodes arguably The Walking Dead at the very height of its powers, stringing together stunning instalments and revelations week after week. It premiered with the single best episode of the show so far, and continued ratcheting up the villainy of Gareth and his cannibalistic fellow Terminus survivors before they’re brutally slaughtered by heroes we’ve followed for years, no longer willing to grant second chances.

The gothic church setting juxtaposed beautifully with the godless world and savagery surrounding it, while the later expansion to the peaceful community of Alexandria allowed for fascinating thematic studies of forever-changed people failing to settle back into the mundanity of domestic life.

The Walking Dead isn’t perfect, and nor is its best season, which spent portions of its first half focusing on the plight of Beth in a corrupt Atlanta hospital, an isolated setting which cut us off from the main story right when it was at its most compelling, miring characters in a subplot of futile escape and doomed rescue. The Alexandria setting also began to inflate the cast to its breaking point as many of the new characters lacked intrigue and complexity.

Still, these complaints in themselves aren’t enough to taint a season which showed no shortage of gripping, dramatic material for its vast array of characters, offering emotionally hard-hitting deaths along with some of the show’s goriest and most violent moments yet.

Best Episode: No Sanctuary - It didn’t take long for Terminus to reveal itself as a house of horrors, and the season premiere quickly spirals events into pure, unadulterated mayhem. The slaughter sequence is unflinchingly brutal and intense, the cannibal antagonists are given an unsettling touch of sympathy, and the triumphant opener masterfully, touchingly reunites loose strands of the group, with Carol saving our heroes among a multitude of fist-pumping moments. The fifth season begins on terrific form.

Worst Episode: Coda - The midseason finale marked a disappointing end to an otherwise brilliant half-season, as the appropriately named Coda does little more than cause its characters to detour from what’s really interesting, concluding a disconnected subplot with one of the few deaths in the season that comes off as pointless, random violence for the sake of random violence.

How would you rank the seasons of The Walking Dead? Let us know down in the comments.