Today I will be doing a spoiler-free review of season 5 of The Walking Dead. This is without a doubt the best season this show has produced for me. The first few episodes follow up on where season 4 ended in a massive way. The first episode is titled “No Sanctuary” and is absolutely amazing from start to finish. The action just takes over and is nonstop the entire time. That is definitely a theme of this season with the nonstop action. This season also focuses on the group trying to find a safe haven. In the second half of the season this new place “Alexandria” comes into play and some cool story arcs begin there. Some of the other standout episodes include episodes 3, 7, 8, 9, 10, 14, and 15. These episodes were all very good in their different ways. Some were just action scenes while other episodes were based on emotion and story. Episode 15 also has one of the best scenes the show has to offer at the end. Episode 16 though is my favorite of the season, and currently my favorite the show has ever produced. The whole episode is great but the last 15-20 minutes are some of the best TV ever. Rick Grimes absolutely shines here as he always does. The ending is great as well with a minor cliffhanger.
There are honestly a few different villains in this season. There are multiple different arcs that allow more than one villain to take place. At the beginning of the season, it’s the same villain that’s revealed at the end of season 4. Later on towards the middle, they focus on this group of people in a hospital. I don’t know if I would consider them “villains” but regardless they are the antagonists in this situation. The final half of the show there really isn’t one except for the walkers. The main characters this season are still led by Rick, Daryl, Carol, Maggie, and Glenn. Some new characters emerge while Abraham and Rosita start taking a much bigger role in the show. Carl also begins to be more important and more involved in the main stories that are going on. Honestly, for me the only thing to slightly complain about with this season would be the pacing at times. This has always been an issue in some capacity for this show and they never fully fixed it. There obviously has to be a filler episode or two and that’s fine, but there were one or two episodes that just didn’t click at all for me. Everything else in this season easily makes up for that small issue though. You can just look at all of those episodes I listed earlier and see how many really good episodes there are.
I always rate shows I watch and I rate them based on 10 things in the show. Those things are action, acting, cinematography, pacing, score, characters, ending, plot, protagonist, and antagonist. I rate all of those pieces 1-10 and then after that, I add up the scores of all 10 of them and get a total score out of 100. I gave this season a 98/100, and the only reason it wasn’t a max score was because of the pacing issue I mentioned earlier. Everything else got a max score though, and that really shows you all you need to know about how good this season is.
