Originally written April 8, 2015

The Walking Dead has been something of a hit or miss in the entirety of its lifespan. Season 1 was great, season 2 was slow but had good character development, season 3 was fantastic until it had an anticlimactic second half, and season 4 was way too dragged out (I was way too nice towards it in my initial review, definitely my least favorite season so far). And now we have season 5…which is kind of just all over the place.

Season 5 opens really well. Rick and his fellow survivors are trapped in Terminus, the “safe haven” that they all took forever to travel to in the second half of season 4. Now they find themselves against a group of people that like to hunt, kill, and eat humans. This storyline was really well done and keeps the show moving at a nice pace, which was a welcome change after things went way too slow in the second half of season 4.

However, in the entirety of its 16 episodes, that’s obviously not the only storyline going on in season 5. In fact, it’s wrapped up relatively quickly. The Walking Dead tends to divide its seasons into two “half seasons” every season. However, the hunters storyline doesn’t take up the story for the first half of the season, and so the rest of the first half until its midseason break, this season introduced a new storyline to fill up the space for the rest of the first half, and it’s a storyline revolving around what happened to Beth at the end of season 4. This was probably the weak point of the season. While I love Beth and wanted to know what happened to her, the storyline was pretty slow and boring, and the people involved didn’t feel like much of a threat compared to what we’ve already seen on the show. Plus, during this storyline the show continued the annoying trend of having the group split up into multiple groups and have individual episodes for each subgroup, which I felt was what brought down the second half of season 4, and it happened again here. The show works better when the group is all in one place, and while having some one-off episodes here and there is fine (it worked in season 3), it just makes the show worse.

Then the second half of season 5 happened. While it did start off a little rocky and slow in its first two episodes, after that things really pick up, and the final five or six episodes of the season completely change the dynamic of the show, which is a breath of fresh air. As a fan of the comic, I found that it was at this point where they were adapting the comic the most faithfully, albeit with a few small changes to make it work better for television, and I feel like it’s at this point where the show was working best. I feel that for the most part, when the writers try to come up with their own stories for the show, they usually don’t work too well.

So in the end season 5 was a bit of a mixed bag, but mostly positive. It starts off strong, then gets a bit boring in the middle, and then gets really good again towards the end of the season. While a few of the episodes felt like a chore to watch, for the most part this was a great season, and was definitely a big improvement over the previous season. If I had to rank the seasons so far, I’d say 3 was the best, then 1, then 5 right in the middle, then 2 slightly below that, and 4 being the worst.

4/5