The Walking Dead’s 15 Worst Episodes Ranked

AMC’s “The Walking Dead” is one of the most beloved and successful cable series of all time, and most of its run can also be safely grouped in among the best. The show’s deployment of contemplative stillness, gritty anyone-can-die naturalism, and dutifully character-driven storytelling in the context of a gnarly zombie apocalypse is nothing sort of enthralling, and has produced some of the finest television of the 21st century.

As it happens, however, “The Walking Dead” was one of those shows so massively popular that its continuation eventually became less a question of artistic expediency, and more a question of financial necessity. And, as such, there are inevitably some duds among its whopping 177 (!) episodes, especially in the latter seasons. Read on for a ranking of the 15 absolute worst — those wearying, mind-numbing low points that made keeping up with “The Walking Dead” occasionally feel almost like a chore.

The long-dreaded breaking point of Daryl (Norman Reedus) and Carol (Melissa McBride)’s fractured friendship on Season 10, “Find Me” returns to the classic “The Walking Dead” well of interspersing present-day events with detailed, ostensibly character-revealing flashbacks. In this case, while Daryl and Carol are hunting for food in the woods, they happen upon a cabin that unearths memories of Daryl’s tryst with Leah (Lynn Collins), the original owner of his dog, a few years prior.

On paper, it could have been a touching look into Daryl’s more vulnerable side; bridging his current falling-out with Carol and his past grief over Rick (Andrew Lincoln) through the intervening story of a bitterly failed romance is a sharp, ripe idea. The problem is that we’ve been through the “Daryl softens up” routine countless times by this point, and, within that context, Daryl and Leah’s relationship never once feels vivid or specific enough to earn its emotional beats. In typical late-period “The Walking Dead” fashion, “Find Me” rushes through shallow, redundant scenes that attempt to substitute vague signifiers of a good story for the actual components of one.

The late Season 10 installment “Splinter” takes a break from the development of the show’s overarching narrative to offer up a character study in an enclosed space. Princess (Paola Lázaro) is captured by soldiers along with Eugene (Josh McDermitt), Ezekiel (Khary Payton), and Yumiko (Eleanor Matsuura). Each of them gets imprisoned in an isolated boxcar, at which point Princess winds up getting a splinter in her finger that triggers a PTSD response.

It’s not a bad thing for the episode to subsequently focus on Princess’ frayed mental state, nor is it inherently objectionable that the narrative structure largely follows a circular pattern of Princess leaving and then returning and then leaving and then returning to the boxcar. This would all be productively brazen writing if “Splinter” actually explored Princess’ inner life in any sort of tangible way. But, as attuned to the physical nuances of PTSD as Lázaro proves in this acting showcase, her excellent performance is strenuously compensating for the episode’s chronic inability to express character or psychology through the actual storytelling. It’s fine that we haven’t moved forward plot-wise by the end of “Splinter,” but it’s downright bizarre that we leave the episode with hardly any deeper understanding of who Princess is.

Season 11 of “The Walking Dead,” with which the show ended, was surprisingly consistent for a series that was by then already long past its prime. But it did have a glaring dry stretch in its immediate follow-up to the two-part premiere. Skipping right over the question of how Maggie’s (Lauren Cohan) group spent its hazardous first hours after scattering at the end of “Acheron,” “Hunted” follows Maggie on a rather nonsensical survival adventure, as she escapes the Reapers and then gradually regroups with her party. Meanwhile, Carol is back in Alexandria, struggling with the killing of a horse.

The whole episode banks on keeping things moving along without inviting the viewer to think about it too hard, in order to finally get Maggie and Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) alone with each other on the road. But it just doesn’t hang together — first, because the shooting and editing of the action itself are often jumbled; secondly, because it’s obvious that Maggie’s newly-introduced friends are just redshirts waiting to be dispensed with; thirdly, because the would-be kinetic writing keeps shortchanging what we know of Maggie and Negan as characters. Carol’s subplot, meanwhile, is just barely there.

“Start to Finish,” the Season 6 midseason finale, follows the immediate aftermath of the breach that allows walkers into Alexandria, jumpstarting various scattered plots as the characters scramble to take shelter and survive. It’s an action-packed, intermittently engaging hour that’s unfortunately swarmed by the same careless writing that plagued most of the first half of Season 6.

On one side of the episode, you have the conflict between Carol and Morgan (Lennie James) in the latter’s house, as he preposterously insists on keeping the as-yet-unnamed Wolf leader (Benedict Samuel) alive, pushing Carol to manifest an equally preposterous hurry to deal with the Wolf mid-invasion, even if it means killing Morgan too — an already-contrived setup that gets worse when the ensuing altercation plays out downright goofily. 

On the other side, you have the group escape plan that gets complicated in the laziest way possible by little Sam (Major Dodson), seemingly oblivious to how walkers work, calling out to his mother. A good cliffhanger ending begets anticipation; the one in this episode just begets exhaustion.

Just as the front half of Season 4 was inching towards its conclusion, “The Walking Dead” made the questionable decision to take a two-episode detour. “Live Bait” and “Dead Weight” tell, in flashback, the story of how the Governor (David Morrissey), one of “The Walking Dead’s” most annoying characters, adopted a new identity after carrying out the Woodbury massacre at the end of Season 3 — and how he eventually wound up watching our heroes from outside the West Georgia prison.

While “Live Bait” is a pretty interesting remix of our expectations for the Governor as a character, “Dead Weight” is just interminable. Redemption and its limits could be a fruitful theme, but the episode refuses to commit to exploring it, instead defaulting to the Governor’s inevitable descent back into his old self with no nuance or revelation. As a result, there’s just absolutely nothing left in his hostile takeover of Martinez’s (Jose Pablo Cantillo) new camp to warrant a whole additional hour away from the main action.

In its boldest, most memorable moments, “The Walking Dead” was a show that displayed a stunning amount of patience and pensiveness for a blockbuster TV production, allowing the intrinsic melancholia of the characters’ situation to spread to the banks of the action-thriller structuring and lend it incomparable weight. In its worst moments, meanwhile, it was a show that resigned itself to doing little to nothing and calling it art.

The Season 5 episode “Them” is an example of “The Walking Dead” in the latter mode: Its commitment to slow-paced reflection is admirable on principle, but, in practice, it’s just prestige dressing for a script with little emotion or insight to offer. 

Following the midseason premiere “What Happened and What’s Going On,” the group is tired, thirsty, hopeless, and deep in the mire of grief, reduced to traveling to Washington D.C. on foot while questioning the use of doing so. It’s a wonderful setup for a potentially gut-wrenching hour, but the writing is just not up to task; every conversation, anguished decision, existential beat, and hope-giving speech is made up of stuff we’ve seen before repeatedly.

Speaking of episodes that mistake boredom for depth, “Cherokee Rose” grinds Season 2 to a halt so that the characters can take an ostensible breather at Hershel’s (Scott Wilson) farm while mourning Otis (Pruitt Taylor Vince). Shane (Jon Bernthal) wrestles with guilt over being secretly responsible for Otis’ death, the group tries and fails to get a walker out of a well without contaminating the water, Glenn (Steven Yeun) and Maggie visit a drugstore and have sex, and Daryl looks for Sophia (Madison Lintz), doesn’t find her, and brings a Cherokee rose to Carol as consolation.

If this summary of plot occurrences reads a bit artless, it’s only because that’s how the episode plays them. Everything just sort of happens and none of it is very engrossing, with the “looking for Sophia” plot, in particular, having long since run its course by this point in the season, and here becoming borderline self-parodic in its continued listlessness. Glenn and Maggie’s awkward courtship is a saving grace, but this is otherwise a stultifying lull in a generally strong season.

“Twice as Far” is one of those “The Walking Dead” installments that would be entirely forgettable if not for the peculiarity of being really bad. With life back to normal in Alexandria following the attack on the Saviors, Denise (Merritt Wever) leads Daryl and Rosita (Christian Serratos) on a supply run to a nearby apothecary; Abraham (Michael Cudlitz) and Eugene drop by a factory; Saviors show up; things go south.

None of this is especially compelling from a dramatic standpoint, mind you, but what makes “Twice as Far” drop below the level of mere wheel-spinning is that its few moments of any consequence make no sense and have no grounding whatsoever. It’s unspeakably silly, for one thing, that Alexandria’s only medic should be going around on random expeditions without any survival experience; what befalls Denise feels less tragic than dispiritingly telegraphed. To make matters worse, after half-heartedly nodding to Carol’s moral crisis once or twice, “Twice as Far” ends on her abrupt, utterly unconvincing decision to leave Alexandria, strictly — and obviously — because the writers need her somewhere else. Merritt Wever deserved better than to depart the show with this.

Season 7’s “Swear,” a four-year “The Walking Dead” ratings low, illustrates how new and fascinating bits of world-building were, by this point in the show’s run, all too likely to just land on the same old formulas. The episode begins with Tara’s (Alanna Masterson) split from Heath (Corey Hawkins) due to a walker attack during their mid-Season-6 supply run — already a pretty flighty action sequence. Then, Tara ends up in Oceanside, where all the men over 10 years old were killed by the Saviors, leaving only a battalion of heavily-armed women who strive to keep their existence a secret.

Does “Swear” explore the particularities of this demographically unique enclave of survivors, the textures of their day-to-day life under the weight of grief, or the ways in which Tara feels about having found them? No it does not: Oceanside is yet another nondescript mass of solemn pragmatists, whose introduction suggests none of the importance they’ll eventually take on in the show’s mythology. Worse yet, when Tara makes it back to Alexandria and learns about Denise’s demise, she barely gets to react at all. Just wasted potential all the way down.

Where to even begin with “Dead or Alive Or?” There’s the part about Daryl and company leading the Alexandria survivors to Hilltop, which finds Tara not only still struggling to trust Dwight (Austin Amelio) — which, fair enough — but actively looking to kill him even as that drive for revenge jeopardizes the whole group, and even though she herself did a heel turn back in her Governor days.

Then there’s the utterly ridiculous, Looney Tunes-level subplot in which a nearly blind Gabriel (Seth Gilliam) is guided by his faith into finding a house that coincidentally stores a bunch of medicine, and then somehow, while nearly blind, shoots straight at the head of a walker attacking Dr. Carson (R. Keith Harris).

And none of this tomfoolery is getting into the really unforgivable thing: The infuriatingly muted reaction of the cast to learning about Carl’s (Chandler Riggs) death. Plot contrivances are one thing, but if long-standing protagonists won’t so much as meaningfully respond to the loss of a core cast member, why even bother?

“Now” is another in the storied history of just-get-on-with-it “The Walking Dead” episodes, and it is one that aptly demonstrates what makes these chapters of the show so frustrating. The idea of giving the cast a moment to breathe and recalculate after the Wolf invasion is a sound one, storytelling-wise. But it crumbles under the series’ cardinal sin: The assumption that people brooding and speechifying are intrinsically compelling, without any need to put in the work to make us care about those people.

Simply put, it’s hard to care about any of the Alexandria residents who take center stage in “Now.” They’re not, by this point on the show, vivid enough to inspire investment (save for Deanna), and the episode doesn’t help matters by depicting their rude awakening into the world’s reality exactly as it has depicted the rude awakening of every other character in its history, complete with the same rote monologues and go-nowhere arguments. It’s “The Walking Dead” at its most inane.

Season 8 of “The Walking Dead” gets off to a rough start, and, by the time we get to its third episode, it feels like a ship stuck out in a motionless sea — which is absurd when there’s a literal all-out war going on. With Negan still stranded in a walker-surrounded trailer alongside Gabriel, “Monsters” is left to focus on the heroes’ capture of various scattered Saviors, and on the moral issues that ensue, and on the question of how much they can really be called heroes, hence the title, etc.

It’s all about as entertaining and illuminating as that sort of thing tends to go this late into the show. For starters, the whole conundrum is predicated on a laughable premise: That a group going into war wouldn’t previously work out a protocol for how to deal with surrendered captures. But that’s a necessary plot allowance, you see, in order to facilitate endless scenes of characters arguing about whether it’s right and fair to kill this or that untrustworthy goon, as if this were Season 2 and this kind of identically-worded dilemma still held some weight.

The thing about bad filmmaking is that it’s bad regardless of the packaging. And so it is that, just prior to the mind-numbing pseudo-profound repetitiveness of “Monsters,” we have the mind-numbing pseudo-profound repetitiveness of “The Damned” — but with action sequences!

Season 8’s second installment proves that even war games and wall-to-wall shootouts aren’t enough to muster excitement by themselves if the writing and directing are not up to standard. It’s not a “filler” episode, but it might as well be: The Alexandria-Kingdom-Hilltop alliance is focused on carrying out a methodical multi-target attack on the Saviors, but the mechanics of their master plan are never revealed to us, such that we’re left to gawk at a bunch of confusingly-shot action sequences without ever really grasping the stakes.

Coupled with the requisite millionth discussions about the humanity of killing, the increasingly unmoored characterizations, and the anticlimactic “big return” of Season 1’s mostly-forgotten Morales (Juan Pareja), the episode just gets to feel childish; it’s as though the show were screaming “This is war!” in your face without understanding what constitutes war narratives and makes them affecting.

On “The King, the Widow, and Rick,” the protagonists have successfully cornered the Saviors with a siege on the Sanctuary, and are well on their way to winning the war — which naturally means that the show must whip up some artificial trouble. First, Rick idiotically goes to the Scavengers alone to request the help of Jadis (Pollyanna McIntosh) in the war, even though the siege is working and they’re in no real need of additional brawn.

As Rick gets expectably imprisoned for his troubles, Daryl and Tara are idiotically deciding, for no reason at all, that it’s time to stop waiting and wipe out the Saviors, which will naturally entail the collapse of the siege on subsequent episodes. The enormously frustrating nature of this whole fiasco is made worse by how enervating “The King, the Widow, and Rick” is on every other front, from Carl’s faux-deep dialogue to the perfunctory action detour that exists solely because the writers suddenly remembered that Rosita and Michonne (Danai Gurira) are still part of the cast. The entire thing just feels like an insulting cheat.

In 1975, Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman directed “Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles,” a 200-minute experimental film that follows a few days in a widowed housewife’s domestic routine, with long, static takes of her doing chores around the house. It’s one of the greatest movies of all time, a bold masterpiece that departs from storytelling convention to grapple attentively with the way humans actually, materially live their everyday lives. But the reason it’s a masterpiece and not a slog is that Akerman is a genius, who infuses every little gesture, glance, decision, and cut between camera angles with riveting significance and hypnotic intention.

“Diverged,” the second-to-last episode of “The Walking Dead” Season 10, is not a work of genius. It certainly wants to be, claiming for itself a haughty, self-indulgent willingness to just accompany Daryl and Carol on a series of mundane tasks carried out alone after their split, as if their plot-free drudgery were the stuff of arthouse slow cinema. But unlike “Jeanne Dielman” (or “Breaking Bad'”s “Fly,” to name a contextually closer analogue), there’s no aesthetic, emotional, or existential revelation to be found in “Diverged.” We watch two well-worn characters display the same psychological shades they’ve shown before, and the direction and writing don’t make the substance of their chores interesting or meaningful. It’s just ambling — the apex of this show having an hour to fill, and nothing whatsoever to fill it with.