Originally written April 4, 2016

When a show is as far into its run as The Walking Dead now is, it’s rare for quality to be sustained. Usually by a show’s sixth season, its quality starts to see a drop and viewership starts to decline. I felt like this show’s quality started to decline a bit in season 4, and it kind of stayed that way into some of season 5 as well. However, something interesting happened in season 5 where the second half of the season suddenly got really good, and things became very engaging again. Luckily, this momentum continues through the entirety of season 6, and not only is season 6 sustaining the show’s quality, it’s actually probably the best season of the series so far.

Part of the reason for this is that the show has such excellent source material to pull from. As a huge fan of the comic, there are certain storylines that I’ve really been looking forward to seeing done in the show, and season 6 is where some of the comic’s best storylines start to take form on the screen. In recent seasons of The Walking Dead, rather than having a continuous story arc for an entire season, we’ve been seeing the show kind of have one main arc for the first half of the season and then a different one for the second half. This happens again with season 6, and I don’t want to go too in-depth with it so that I’ll avoid spoiler territory. However, basically the first half of the season revolves around the group dealing with the threat of the largest herd of walkers they’ve ever seen. They’re trying to re-route the herd away from their community, but obviously some troubles happen along the way. The second half shifts the threat away from the walkers and instead puts it back on the humans, which is almost always more engaging (and certainly is in this case). The group discovers that there are other large communities nearby, and begin to discover that while some of them are willing to form alliances, others may be completely dangerous.

Over the years, I’ve found that The Walking Dead is never one of my favorite shows of all time, despite its huge popularity. However, in its early seasons it always managed to stay engaging most of the time by constantly finding new and interesting ways to keep the show moving forward. Its problems over the years started to stem when you could tell that the show was simply having filler moments to fill in the gaps between the “big” moments. This winded up becoming a big problem, because while season openers and finales were fantastic, some of the stuff in between all started to blend and drag. This particularly became problematic during episodes where we would see long stretches of the group simply walking from one place to another, with many filler conversations that took up the duration of the episodes. Or another example of this is when they would have episodes that focused on only a few characters where there just wasn’t enough drama to sustain something interesting for a whole episode.

I bring up the past problems the show has been having in recent years only to highlight how much the show has managed to improve itself with season 6. Like I said, the show managed to gain some huge momentum in the tail end of its fifth season, and so the fact that the show was able to keep this momentum going so strongly all the way through season 6 is really impressive. It didn’t feel like there were hardly any filler episodes, and so while the season/midseason openers and finales were some of the best episodes, the stuff in between was also really fun to watch. Also, there weren’t really any “walking episodes” or anything like that, and they kept the number of episodes that focused on individual characters to a minimum. Not only that, but anytime there were episodes like that, they suited the story really well rather than being for contrived reasons. These episodes still managed to be really interesting as well.

As has been the usual for the past few seasons, season 6 brings another 16 episodes to the show, and there really weren’t nearly as many down moments as there has been in recent years. Thinking about it as a whole, I definitely preferred the second half of the season to the first half, but the first half was still more interesting than some of the recent storylines the show has delved into. Season 6 starts off with some interesting material, but by the end of the season it’s gone into amazing territory. Not only has season 6 kept the show at the quality it got to in the end of season 5, it’s actually raised the stakes even higher and set itself up for a potentially fantastic seventh season. Like I said, most shows tend to taper off in quality by this point in their run, and while it looked like The Walking Dead was also heading in that direction for a while season 6 really managed to turn that around and reinvigorate some excitement into the show. I absolutely loved this season and I can’t wait for the next one.

4.5/5