The Walking Dead will never die. The massively popular horror drama based on Robert Kirkman’s acclaimed comic series ended in 2022, but it lives on after death in your Netflix queue, where all 11 seasons are available to stream. The Walking Dead is set in a contemporary postapocalyptic America where an unexplainable virus has turned most people into undead, flesh-hungry monsters. For nine seasons, courageous but brutal former sheriff’s deputy Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) leads an ever-changing group of survivors as they try to stay alive long enough to build a better future. In the series’ final years, his family and friends try to carry out his vision in his absence.
The Walking Dead is a dark show filled with tragedy and violence, but it’s also life-affirming in its own particular way. Here are 15 essential episodes that show what The Walking Dead is all about: intense action, complex characters and an emotionally rich narrative about people who’ve been through hell coming together.
Season 1, Episode 1: “Days Gone Bye”
Everything great about The Walking Dead is right there in the very first episode: The distinctive grainy 16-millimeter film that makes it look like a drive-in horror movie. The complicated hero who’ll go to extreme lengths to protect the people he loves. The brutality of the world these characters live in. (Rick shoots a zombified little girl in the head in the show’s opening scene.) The theme of people finding connection through shared trauma. It’s all there. The show begins when Rick wakes up from a coma in an abandoned hospital that’s overrun with zombies. The world has ended, but he’s still alive. He meets fellow survivor Morgan (Lennie James) and sets out on a journey to find his family. It started a billion-dollar franchise that continues to this day, in spin-offs like Fear the Walking Dead and the upcoming The Walking Dead: Dead City.
Season 2, Episode 7: “Pretty Much Dead Already”
This episode is an early contender for most devastating hour of The Walking Dead ever. Rick’s group spends the first half of Season 2 looking for Carol’s (Melissa McBride) daughter, Sophia (Madison Lintz), who goes missing in the premiere. They find her in Episode 7, when she shuffles out of a barn full of walkers. She’s been dead the whole time. After a half season of methodical buildup that Sophia might be recovered safe and sound, the reveal knocks the wind out of you. The scene has no dialogue, because words would fail to describe the horror. The characters’ anguished faces tell the whole story.
Season 3, Episode 4: “Killer Within”
No one emotes like Andrew Lincoln. The actor is known for getting himself in character for intense scenes by rolling around on the ground and screaming and carrying on. Episodes like “Killer Within” prove his process is worth the effort. In this episode, Rick’s wife, Lori (Sarah Wayne Callies), needs an emergency C-section to deliver their daughter, Judith, a procedure that proves fatal for Lori. Before she dies, she gives an encouraging speech to their son, Carl (Chandler Riggs), telling him he’s “going to beat this world.” She passes, and Carl stabs her in the head before she can reanimate. In case you didn’t understand the gravity of the situation, Lincoln’s astounding performance drives it home. When Rick finds out what happened, he chokes out “OH NO” before words fail him and he falls to the ground in misery.
Season 4, Episode 8: “Too Far Gone”
If you want an episode that exemplifies The Walking Dead’s knack for marrying explosive action with emotional potency, look no further. After being defeated by the Grimes Gang in Season 3, the charismatic psychopath known as the Governor (David Morrissey) returns to attack the prison where Rick’s group is living. He has new minions and a working tank. He takes Michonne (Danai Gurira) and Hershel (Scott Wilson) hostage, and after delivering a whispered one-word rebuttal to Rick’s impassioned plea for peace — “Liar” — he hacks off kindly old man Hershel’s head with Michonne’s katana. This kicks off one of the most exciting battles in the show’s whole run. If you don’t gasp when that tank smashes down the prison’s fence, you might be a walker yourself. But the action is emotionally grounded in the loss of Hershel, one of the show’s most fundamentally decent and beloved characters.
Season 4, Episode 14: “The Grove”
Melissa McBride gives The Walking Dead’s most soulful performance as Carol Peletier, a woman who goes through unspeakable traumas but always comes out tougher — and this episode puts Carol through a lot of trauma. Carol is caring for three little girls, sisters Lizzie (Brighton Sharbino) and Mika (Kyla Kenedy) as well as Rick’s infant daughter, Judith. Lizzie is psychologically unstable and doesn’t understand that walkers are dangerous. In fact, she thinks they’re her friends, which makes her a danger to the people around her. A compassionate Carol tries to help Lizzie, but then Lizzie kills Mika, convinced that Mika will come back happy. So Carol is forced to make a nightmarish choice: For the greater good, Lizzie has to go. The scene where Carol puts Lizzie down is almost incomprehensibly crushing. If you say “Look at the flowers” to any Walking Dead fan, they’ll start crying.
Season 5, Episode 1: “No Sanctuary”
When this season premiere first aired in 2014, it felt like everybody and their bloodthirsty mother tuned in to find out how the group was going to escape the cannibals at Terminus. Carol blows up the fortress’ walls with a rocket launcher and lets a swarm of walkers stream in. But before that, millions of people were treated to the can’t-be-unseen sight (and sound) of Terminants cracking bound victims in the head with a baseball bat, then slitting their throats and letting them bleed out into a trough. Rick tells Terminus leader Gareth (Andrew J. West) that when he gets his red-handled machete back, he’s going to kill him with it — and a few episodes later, he does just that.
Season 5, Episode 16: “Conquer”
Season 5’s storylines all come together in this well-balanced episode that makes excellent use of the sprawling ensemble cast. Here’s an incomplete list of everything great that happens: Morgan nonchalantly beats up two bandits with his staff; Sasha (Sonequa Martin-Green) despondently lies down in a mass grave of walker bodies, imagining what it would be like to be dead; a blood-soaked Rick gives one of his greatest “my way or the highway” speeches to the sheltered Alexandrians who are still afraid to get their hands dirty; and Rick executes domestic abuser Pete (Corey Brill) at the exact moment his friend Morgan, who’s ideologically opposed to killing, arrives at the community. There’s a lot going on, and all of it works.
Season 6, Episode 4: “Here’s Not Here”
Throughout The Walking Dead’s early seasons, Morgan appears sporadically, providing an almost musical counterpoint to Rick. Morgan first shows up in the pilot with his son, Duane (Adrian Kali Turner), and then again in Season 3’s “Clear,” after losing his son and his sanity. He returns in better health in Season 5, and joins Rick’s group in Season 6. In “Here’s Not Here,” an emotional standalone episode from that season, we see in flashback the story of how Morgan rediscovered his humanity: a principled man named Eastman (John Carroll Lynch) taught him “all life is precious” and the nonlethal martial art aikido. It’s a lyrical episode with magnificent performances from James and Lynch.
Season 6, Episode 9: “No Way Out”
Bar none the show’s finest wall-to-wall action episode. Taciturn badass Daryl Dixon (Norman Reedus) uses a rocket launcher not once but twice, first to blow up a group of malevolent bikers and then to ignite a gasoline-filled pond in order to draw walkers to their fiery destruction. These explosive moments bookend an episode that also features the savage deaths of Rick’s girlfriend Jessie (Alexandra Breckenridge) and her sons, Carl getting his eye shot out and Rick leading the entire town in a mêlée against the enormous horde of walkers that breached Alexandria’s gates. Teamwork is one of the show’s central themes, and Rick’s stand in this episode is its most inspiring example of people banding together to fight a common enemy.
Season 6, Episode 16: “Last Day on Earth”
Negan’s (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) introductory episode is a master class in mounting dread that culminates in a gut-wrenching cliffhanger. Rick is leading a group of people on a mission to transport Maggie (Lauren Cohan), who’s sick from pregnancy complications, to a doctor in another community. But every road is blocked by Negan’s followers, the Saviors, who corral them into a clearing where the man himself is waiting for them. The foul-mouthed, leather-jacketed authoritarian leader of the Saviors then steps out of an RV and into infamy. He plays a sick game of eeny, meeny, miny, moe as he chooses who he’ll make an example of. The episode ends with a shot from the point of view of Negan’s victim as he smashes their head in with Lucille, his barbed wire-wrapped baseball bat.
Season 7, Episode 1: “The Day Will Come When You Won’t Be”
Picking up where the Season 6 left off, the Season 7 premiere delivers that cliffhanger’s viscerally horrifying reveal. As punishment for Rick’s group killing a bunch of Saviors (including the aforementioned malevolent bikers), Negan sadistically beats Abraham (Michael Cudlitz) and Glenn (Steven Yeun) to death in front of their loved ones. He then tortures Rick Old Testament style, forcing him to prepare to cut off Carl’s hand with an axe, only to relent at the last minute. The Walking Dead was never for the squeamish, but this episode goes so far that even most desensitized horror fans are like, “that’s messed up.” (That’s a compliment!) This episode changed the show forever, because its repercussions were felt all the way to the series finale.
Season 9, Episode 5: “What Comes After”
Partway through Season 9, Lincoln departed The Walking Dead, and the show reset without missing a beat. In his farewell episode, Rick is trying to lead a horde of walkers away from his community while bleeding out after getting impaled on a rebar. As he slips in and out of consciousness, he’s visited by visions of dead loved ones who encourage him to stay alive so he can find his family. At the end of the episode, Rick looks at his group from a distance and says “found ’em” to himself before blowing up the bridge he’s standing on to stop the walkers. Since Rick’s overarching Walking Dead story is his search for his family, it’s fitting that these are his last words in the series. Unbeknownst to his family, he survives the blast and gets rescued by a mysterious helicopter that takes him away on a new adventure fans are still waiting to see.
Season 9, Episode 15: “The Calm Before”
The wildest adversaries the survivors go up against are the Whisperers, a group of weirdos who live among the dead, wearing masks made of skin they peeled off walkers. They’re led by Alpha, a bald-headed death worshipper played by Oscar nominee Samantha Morton. Alpha is responsible for the biggest massacre of notable characters in Walking Dead history. She and her people infiltrate Alexandria and the other communities and take a bunch of hostages, then put their decapitated, zombified heads on pikes. All in all, 10 characters die at once, including longtimers Tara (Alanna Masterson) and Enid (Katelyn Nacon) and major Season 9 character Henry (Matt Lintz). When this episode came out, it showed that even after nine seasons, The Walking Dead still had the power to shock.
Season 10, Episode 12: “Walk with Us”
Alpha has the most surprising death of any of The Walking Dead’s major antagonists. In this episode, Negan, who has joined the Whisperers and become Alpha’s lover, captures her defector daughter Lydia (Cassady McClincy). He brings Alpha to the cabin where he’s supposedly holding the girl so Alpha can kill her. Then it’s revealed that Lydia is actually in a different cabin, and Negan has lured Alpha to this cabin in order to permanently end her reign of terror. He slashes her throat — giving her a tender kiss as she dies — and shortly thereafter presents her severed head to Carol, who snarks “took you long enough.” It turns out Negan was working as a double agent for Carol the whole time, putting himself in grave danger to bring the Whisperers down from the inside. It’s the show’s most satisfying twist ending, and a great character moment for Negan.
Season 10, Episode 22: “Here’s Negan”
The most antiheroic of all The Walking Dead’s antiheroes reflects on his origin story in this standalone episode. Over the years, Negan transformed into a productive member of society, but Maggie still wants him dead for what he did to her husband Glenn. He leaves town and locates his long-lost baseball bat Lucille. He ruminates on his troubled relationship with the bat’s namesake, his wife (Hilarie Burton Morgan, Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s real-life wife), who died at the start of the apocalypse. Negan was an unfaithful, negligent husband, and did the wrong thing even when he tried to do right. But Lucille loved him until the end. He created his sociopathic Savior persona so he wouldn’t have to feel pain and regret over what he did to her. It’s a sad story, but ultimately a hopeful one. On The Walking Dead, even Negan can face his past and change for the better.
