The Walking Dead (2010) / YMMV

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Actor Shipping:
- Watch any YouTube video with Steven Yeun and Lauren Cohan in it and there will certainly be comments from fans wishing they were together or swearing they actually do like each other (even though Yeun is now married as of 2016).
- The same with Norman Reedus and Melissa McBride, thanks to the Ship Tease between their characters and the ambiguous response by both actors when asked about the nature of Daryl and Carol's relationship.
- Norman and Lauren Ridloff as well, thanks to the rise of the Daryl and Connie ship in Seasons 9-11.
- Andrew Lincoln and Danai Gurira have also gotten a bit of this due to Rick and Michonne being a long-awaited couple until Season 6.
Adaptation Displacement:
- As usually happens when a non-superhero comic is adapted. At the very least, many, if not most, fans of the show by now at least know that it's a comic series.
- Fans who have not read the original comic are likely surprised that Daryl Dixon is a character created for the show; that Carol Peletier and Judith Grimes have massively expanded roles compared to their comic counterparts who both died during the prison arc, which was covered relatively early in the show's lifespan.
- Several approaches to characters and plotlines taken by the show have become more praised than their comic counterparts.
  - Several characters become an Adaptational Badass (including Maggie, Rosita, Aaron), others get Adaptational Heroism (Dale, Hershel, Negan), and others get chilling and effective Adaptational Villainy treatments (Dante, the Milton family, and Lance Hornsby).
  - Several of the comic's more gratuitously graphic elements are toned down or removed (The Governor being a violent sexual predator, a lot of Rape as Backstory for the female characters is adapted out).
  - Several characters who were regarded as either unpopular or forgettable at best, such as Carol, Gabriel, and Rosita, get expanded roles and ended up becoming popular series mainstays.
  - The series has also been praised for averting several deaths that were deliberately made to be unsatisfying in the comic. The Governor receives a more satisfying death than getting randomly shot; Abraham at least gets to go out in an act of defiance against Negan; Beta's death is treated with more gravitas worthy of such a formidable villain rather than the bizarre comedic way his comic counterpart died; and Rick is Spared by the Adaptation due to having been written out of the series, while his murderer, Sebastian, suffers a cathartic Death by Adaptation.
Alas, Poor Scrappy:
- Lori was unpopular to say the least, but the scene where she undergoes a fatal C-section without anaesthetic, after which her son Carl has to ensure she doesn't turn can be an absolute tearjerker.
- While Andrea earned a hatedom for being whiny and irresponsible in Season 2 and a Governor fangirl in Season 3, many fans still felt sorry when she was ultimately bitten.
- Noah was unappreciated by many fans for being the The Load, but even many of his haters were mortified by his brutally graphic death.
- Nicholas was roundly hated for being The Load and trying to kill a fan favorite in Season 5, but many fans started to warm up to him when he became The Atoner in Season 6, only for him to have a mental breakdown and kill himself when surrounded by walkers.
- Sam was hated for being The Load and for being Genre Blind when it came to facing the walkers. Just when he started to get his nerves straight and overcame his fears, he remembered Carol's caustic threat about how he'll be devoured by walkers, begins crying, and is promptly eaten alive while screaming for his mother.
- On that note, Ron was hated for also being The Load, an unpleasant jackass who attempted to kill Carl for what happened to his father, and was dubbed "Porchdick Jr" by the fandom. Going into the mid-Season 6 premiere, he was on pretty much everybody's shitlist, but it's very easy to see why he does what he does in his final moments, holding Rick responsible for the loss of his family. It helps that he's in tears as he raises his gun to attack Rick, devastated by losing his entire family in the blink of an eye.
- Spencer was loathed for being a traitorous prick especially towards Rick and even tried to ally with Negan so that he'd be overthrown. But similar to Ron above, he slowly lost his family when Rick and his group arrived in Alexandria. He also deeply wanted to be a competent survivor and had somewhat of a relationship with Rosita only for both to crash and burn in an instant when Negan kills him on a whim in the most utterly horrific fashion possible leaving the townspeople horrified and Rosita and even Rick distraught.
- Henry was disliked for his completely stupid and rash decisions with both the Saviors and the Whisperers, but even he didn't deserve to be decapitated and have his head stand on a pike.
- Gage was disliked for being a typical teenage bully character, but many fans were absolutely horrified at his death scene, where he commits suicide by stabbing himself in the chest to avoid the pain of being devoured by walkers after Maggie refused to save him.
Alternative Character Interpretation:
- Is Shane a decisive and pragmatic leader who can make tough decisions quickly or a selfish hot-head suffering from Sanity Slippage? Are his arguments to call off the search for Sophia pragmatic or is he just trying to ignore the problem? When he tells Rick to shoot him at the end of "Better Angels", is he mocking Rick because he thinks he can't do it or does he want Rick to do it out of guilt?
  - On a related note, did Rick really kill Shane for the sake of the group, or was it all for the sake of securing leadership and his claim on Lori?
- Lori was initially seen as being mad at Rick for killing Shane in the second season finale, but various comments from people on Quora and Reddit and LiveJournal point out that Lori is more devastated than angry as Rick recounts what happened between him and Shane, and it's not until he mentions that Carl put Shane down that she gets angry. Was Lori angry at Rick for killing Shane, or was she actually angry that Carl was involved, and more importantly, does she believe that Rick allowed Carl to put Shane down?
- Is Andrea The Load or an Action Woobie?
- How much did Maggie believe in her father's view of the walkers? She may have gone along with her father's plan simply to keep the peace in the family, and argued with Glenn over it because she felt like she had to defend her family's point of view.
- Early episodes made fans wonder whether Rick is an effective leader or a fine example of Good Is Dumb? Later episodes have him straddling the line between anti-hero and nominal hero.
- Given Michonne is only right about the Governor by coincidence (since purely from her frame of reference there is painfully little to make her suspicious), perhaps she's just against Woodbury because she doesn't want security and civilization to diminish her role as a sword-wielding badass. The later reveal that she lost her child when her previous camp was overrun has given rise to the theory she was suffering from PTSD at the thought of history repeating itself.
- Is Dale the group's voice of reason and compassion or just an old man who refuses to adapt to the new Crapsack World?
- Is the Governor's obsession with the prison actually about protecting his own or is it really about revenge? Did he really intend to let Rick's group go free or was he planning to kill them all anyway? Did he change from one motive to another? If so, when and in which direction?
- Is Dawn a desperate leader doing her best to keep everything afloat despite being in over her head, or a manipulative control freak willing to do anything (including fake emotions) to keep everyone under her thumb?
- Did Owen the Alpha Wolf sacrifice his life in order to save Denise, or was he only keeping her alive so she could heal him in the long run, but failed when Carol got the drop on him?
- How genuine was Simon in the Season 6 finale when he made a speech to Rick about cherishing his loved ones as if it was their last day on earth? While Simon certainly qualifies as Faux Affably Evil considering he's in the middle of torturing a man to make an example of him, he's in a position to know what it feels like to suddenly lose friends by surprise after the satellite outpost battle. He also knows exactly what Negan has in store for the group, and later allows the group to help Maggie down from the stretcher with no strings attached. Steven Ogg has just enough of a weary tinge to his delivery of the speech that can make one wonder.
- Is Eugene working with Negan because he has no other option and is too much of a coward to fight back? Or is he merely playing along so he can damage Negan's operation from the inside? The answer? Both, though he mostly leans towards the former.
- Was Fat Joey truly just a Punch-Clock Villain who was genuinely allowing Daryl to escape the Sanctuary or was he just pretending to allow him to escape in order to shoot him In the Back?
- Did Shira ghost Eugene because she was no longer comfortable with the fake relationship as the episode seems to imply? Or was it because she realized she wouldn't be able to hide her true nature as a covert agent of Lance's if she moved in with Eugene as he wanted? It's all but said that Shira had been sleeping with Eugene as part of the act, which is already quite a lot to ask of any covert agent, let alone for an extended period of time, suggesting the latter was her reason for ghosting him.
Angst? What Angst?:
- Daryl is devastated by having to put down his zombified brother Merle at the end of "This Sorrowful Life", but at the start of the next episode, Daryl is back at the prison and apparently over it; the whole thing is only sparsely mentioned from that time onward. Norman Reedus himself was disappointed Daryl didn't get an episode to mourn.
- All the surviving group members except Beth are reunited in "No Sanctuary", yet her sister Maggie (who spent most of the previous half-season strenuously angsting over her husband) doesn't spare a single thought for her sister, even when joining The Quest to Washington. This is addressed in "Them" (and in more detail down in Salvaged Story).
- We don't see much of the immediate fallout of the death of the Anderson family, but after a two month Time Skip, there's not a mention of them and Rick quickly gets together with Michonne.
  - The time skip unintentionally created a lot of these, as Carl seems to be perfectly fine with losing an eye. He may have had a period of pain and anguish over it but we certainly never saw it.
- The sheer publicity revolving around Glenn’s sudden death in Season 7 meant that Abraham, who only died minutes before him, tends to get overshadowed and forgotten a bit except by Rosita, Sasha, and Eugene. In a later episode, Carl vows vengeance against Negan for killing “his friend”, and it’s clear who he’s talking about. Later when discussing the events of that night, Rick only confides in Michonne his guilt about Glenn’s death. While Abraham is still mentioned from time to time after Season 7, if one of the Lucille victims is discussed or mourned, its usually only Glenn.
- Other than a few shots of them mourning along with the rest of the crowd during Siddiq's speech, Eugene and Rosita have no onscreen reaction whatsoever to Tara's death, which is rather jarring considering how close they were in previous seasons.
  - On that note, Maggie has no reaction to the deaths of Tara, Enid, and Jesus, all of whom were good friends of hers as well. She reads Carol's note explaining what happened to them and doesn't seem affected afterwards.
- Compared to Maggie, Rosita's reaction to Abraham's murderer being spared is never really explored and she never seems that bugged by it beyond treating him with the same casual standoffishness that the other residents of Alexandria do. It's egregious considering she spent much of Season 7 on a borderline-suicidal vengeance quest to ensure that Negan would die.
- 6 months pass between Michonne's departure in "What We Become" to the Commonwealth soldiers arriving at the Hilltop's gates in "Trust". Yet no one but Judith seems perturbed by what might have happened to her after all this time.
Anti-Climax Boss:
- Tomas, the leader of the prison survivors and the most antagonistic of the bunch buts heads with Rick over taking refuge in the prison. After killing Big Tiny, he blatantly tries to kill Rick twice in a row while trying to clear out a cell block full of walkers. After this happens, Rick kills him in one hit in a second by slicing his skull open with a machete.
- The Claimers capture Rick, Michonne, and Carl, take their weapons, and start beating Daryl to death. However, the moment Rick headbutts their leader Mook Chivalry and Why Don't You Just Shoot Him? kick in, the others fight back, and their enemies are killed without much difficulty. The last one even conveniently abandons his hostage just to make an escape that lasts only a dozen strides.
- Despite being advertised and built up as the next major antagonist during the off-season and the first few episodes of the season, Gareth and the Hunters are Out-Gambitted and slaughtered without hardly a fight.
- Bud, the leader of a gang of Saviors whose confrontation with Daryl, Sasha and Abe is shown in The Stinger of the mid-Season 6 finale, and who appeared to have put the three in a very bad position, is unceremoniously blown to smithereens in the mid-season premiere's cold open with the RPG Abe scrounged in the trio's previous episode.
- Owen, the Wolf leader, survives past his brethren and is set up as a major human antagonist for the back half of Season 6. In the same episode as Bud's anticlimactic death, he is unceremoniously bitten while undergoing a sudden change of heart and is then shot by Carol.
- While it's agreed that Beta's actual death is a step-up from the comics, many were disappointed at how quickly he was taken down by Negan and Daryl after proving himself as an unstoppable killing machine in episodes like "Chokepoint" and "Stalker", and wish he'd gone out with a bigger fight beforehand.
- The Whisperers' walker horde from the same episode, as well. Despite its sheer size numbering in the thousands, only one person from the heroes' side is lost to it and the herd is easily dealt with once the Whisperers themselves are out of the picture.
- Pope is only around for four episodes and is killed by his own lieutenant Leah at the end of his tenure. He never fights anyone from the group and just stays at Meridian ranting at others to do his dirty work for him, and only paves the way for Leah to become the Dragon Ascendant... but Leah follows in his footsteps, only returning several episodes after the Reapers are wiped out to briefly menace Maggie before Daryl abruptly kills her.
- Lance is built up as the new main antagonist for Part 2 of Season 11, but he is quickly defeated and imprisoned within two episodes of Part 3 and killed a few episodes later with none of his true agenda coming to light.
Anvilicious:
- The show is often not that subtle with its cast spouting various lectures about the world, morality, humanity, etc. It sometimes falls into Narm territory since on many occasions these sermons feel like nothing actual people would say to each other.
- Season 4B features so many scenes showing humans as not so different from walkers (Daryl sitting and eating while ignoring Beth, Michonne seeing her walker lookalike while blending with a herd, Maggie lying among a pile of bodies, etc.) that some fans complained it was getting heavy-handed. This is especially true in "A" when Rick kills a man by biting out his throat.
- Season 8, revolving around the Savior War, hits you on the head quite viscerally with its theme of “my mercy prevailed over my wrath”. Particularly egregious is Jesus lecturing the rest of the cast on why they can’t kill Saviors even in the midst of critical battles, Carl suffering Death by Adaptation just to get Rick to spare Negan, and the return of Morales solely to give a "Not So Different" Remark rant to Rick.
Arc Fatigue:
- While not as long as other examples, Season 2's search for Sophia was the first to test the fandom's patience since it seemed to go on indefinitely and created many of the subplots blamed for stalling story progression. Then it turned out she was one of the walkers in the barn the whole time.
- Many felt the Prison Arc dragged on too long (24 episodes) and were relieved to see it finally ended satisfactorily in the mid-season finale of Season 4, though there is considerable disagreement on whether it was the prison as a setting or the Governor as an Arc Villain that was exhausted.
- The Cliffhanger of Glenn's apparent death in "Thank You" is followed by a 90-minute How We Got Here Character Focus episode, a Breather Episode full of minor characters few found particularly interesting, and an engrossing but tangential Bottle Episode with only three of the main cast before finally resolving the cliffhanger in "Heads Up". The decision to drag it out so long, especially when many fans immediately said, "Like You Would Really Do It," was criticized by many as a cheap gimmick
- The Savior arc lasting from the second half of Season 6 all the way to the end of Season 8 for several reasons.
  - The buildup to the onscreen appearance of Negan lasts the entire back half of Season 6, and mostly consists of the Saviors being dealt one defeat after another, making it impossible to view them as a serious threat, and with none of them ever getting any kind of personality beyond generic Smug Snake. And then when he finally does show up, we don't even get to see who he kills, just to drag it out even more.
  - Season 7 is noted for an incredibly sluggish pace with next to nothing happening besides the mid-season finale and the season finale. The first half of the season revolves heavily around Negan showing what an utter dick he is, in between occasional Pet the Dog moments, and throughout the season he spends several episodes singing "Hakuna Matata" in an attempt to get a member of Rick's group to join his army or at least try to prove he's not a bad guy. It happens four times in Season 7 with Daryl, Carl, Eugene, and Sasha. The brutal, oppressive premise of Negan constantly humiliating the group does little for the viewers who are forced to endure their heroes suffering.
  - Even when Rick finally decides to fight back, the heroes spend the back half of the season making preparations for war, gathering guns and trying to convince other people to join the fight. It ultimately culminates in only one major action scene towards the end of the finale before promising that the actual war will come next season. It's cold comfort for fans who spent a year waiting for something to happen, and suggests the season didn't have enough story to fill 16 episodes.
  - Season 8 actually delivers the Savior War, but the season premiere is light on actual fighting and it mostly unfolds over a handful of episodes before everyone retreats to their home bases in the back half of the season. Once again, little fighting actually takes place until the season finale, which ends with Rick deciding to spare Negan, despite the last two years of television building up to what could've been his death.
  - The arc's overlength is notorious to the point that Fear the Walking Dead had a borderline-Leaning on the Fourth Wall moment where Morgan says he and Dwight were part of a war that "took too long to end." Even then, lingering bad blood from the Savior War is a major theme of the first five episodes of Season 9, and as a below note will go into detail, keeps going thanks to the feud between Maggie and Negan.
- One of the main themes of the series is the debate over whether the heroes will go too far and become as bad as the villains. Season 4 in particular largely focuses on this, with Rick ultimately learning that you can come back from the horrible things you do in order to survive. Season 5 also confirms this, proving that even when he was on the verge of becoming a Villain Protagonist, Rick was able to dial it back thanks to the support of his loved ones. Unfortunately, despite this resolution, the theme continues to come back time and time again, long after the lesson learned in Seasons 4-5. This is no more evident than the semi-constant presence of a character who will preach that the heroes either cannot commit a ruthless action, or that the heroes in question are just as bad as the villains.
- The feud between Maggie and Negan since Season 9 has dragged on for far too long in the opinion of several fans. Ever since Rick spared Negan, Maggie's entire time on the show since has been devoted to her hatred of Negan. The confrontation between Maggie and Negan from the comics was moved up to occur earlier in the timeline on the eve of Cohan's temporary departure from the show, with the intention that whenever Cohan returned, Maggie's arc would not focus on Negan due to gaining closure from witnessing how far he had fallen. Plans evidently changed since lo and behold, Maggie's entire arc since returning has revolved around Negan. The comics did not have this problem as they had Negan Put on a Bus for the remainder of the series after the Whisperer War, but thanks to deviating from this by keeping Negan around and Cohan having to return from a leave of absence, many fan are exasperated with a feud that In-Universe has gone on for nearly a decade. It’s not until Negan leaves the Coalition and returns as part of a new community that new ground is covered and the plot line finally gets out to rest.
- Mercer's decision to turn on the Commonwealth lasts almost the entirety of 11C, with Princess, Max, Rosita, Negan, Yumiko, and Eugene all taking him to town for enabling the Miltons' cruelty before he finally decides to do something about it. Even when he does, he ultimately doesn't get any major action scene and it's ultimately Daryl who convinces the troops still loyal to Pamela to stand down, making the whole subplot feel wasted.
Artistic License – Pharmacology: In season 2, Lori discovers she is pregnant and asks Glenn to get her the Morning After Pill, which Maggie caustically refers to as "abortion pills." Ultimately, Lori decides to continue the pregnancy and throws up the pills after taking them. However, the Morning After Pill works by delaying ovulation, and would do nothing to interrupt the pregnancy of a person who had already conceived.^note
Ass Pull:
- The Cliffhanger Copout between Season 6's "Start to Finish" and "No Way Out" regarding the Grimes and Anderson families journeying through the horde. The former episode ended with Sam calling out to Jessie with walkers seemingly turning towards him to begin the scene of carnage that the later episode would depict in full, but "No Way Out" picks up with them perfectly fine and acting as if the scene never happened. It also strains credulity that they can stop and have a five minute long conversation standing still while the rest of the horde is still surrounding them, when later, Sam coming to a complete stop in the horde quickly tips off the horde to the disguised human and results in his death.
- "Morning Star" ends with the community fighters stopped from entering Hilltop by a wall of fire created by the Whisperers' flaming arrows as the horde closes in on them from behind. The next episode picks up a while later with the fighters already inside Hilltop and no explanation as to how they got through other than a hole created in Hilltop's wall and the suggestion that they were rescued by those who were not present during the initial attack such as Carol, Alden, and Earl.
- At the beginning of "The Tower", we learn that the community residents have fled to a hospital near Oceanside while they formulate a plan to dispose of the Whisperers' massive walker horde. While it's believable that they would have some other rendezvous to act as a contingency plan in case the communities were overrun, the hospital is literally never mentioned before this episode, making it rather bizarre to see them suddenly set up there. Some fans - at a time when the world was just entering the COVID-19 pandemic - wondered if an episode was missing or unable to air, confused at how suddenly the group was at their new location.
- "The Tower" also ends with Aaron and Alden captured by Whisperers at gunpoint while they scope out the location of the horde. When we next see them they've inexplicably killed most of their captors with no explanation as to how they managed to get the upper hand.
- "No Other Way" sees Lydia find Aaron in another impossible situation, only for the scene to cut to Lydia already having rescued Aaron.
- "Faith" concludes with the fates of all the children sans Hershel up in the air. "Family" reveals they were all found off-screen apparently imprisoned at Alexandria, with only Coco's whereabouts still unknown.
- "Rest in Peace" opens with the group battling the variant-led horde, but by the next scene in the hospital when Luke dies, they're safe inside the hospital, with Carol telling Daryl what happened afterwards. Granted, the former scene ended with Carol clearing a path through the horde and everyone sans Jules escaping, but it's still a very jarring time cut, especially since Daryl was last seen laying unconscious on the hospital floor during the Cold Open. It brought back negative memories of similar miraculous offscreen escapes in the seventh season of Fear from earlier in the year.
Audience-Alienating Era:
- After a widely acclaimed first season that was hailed as one of the best shows on television, the second season was seen by many fans as a Sophomore Slump. With Frank Darabont having left the show, the new show runners and writing team were still finding their footing, and in the first half of the season especially, the show was accused of spinning its wheels on Hershel's farm. Fortunately, things picked up again by the end of the season, and while seasons three through five are not without their flaws, they have since come to be viewed as the show's golden age.
- Unfortunately, ever since the start of Season 6, the series has seen gradually decreasing praise and ratings. Chief complaints are the cliffhangers and fakeouts, long stretches of meandering plot that only get it together for the season finales, and the generally cyclical nature of the series, in which the group encounters a new villain, defeats him, and repeats. Negan especially has been bitterly polarizing, with many fans finding him to be a cartoonish Super Villain whose story has been drawn out for too long.
Award Snub:
- Despite positive reviews from critics and great ratings from audiences, the only Emmys the show has received are two nominations for Visual Effects and Sound Editing and a win for Makeup.
- Many fans and several critics thought that Melissa McBride was legitimately deserving of award attention for her work in Season 4, particularly for her performance in "The Grove".
- Andrew Lincoln's repeated snubbing for his strong and complex work as Rick Grimes has led many fans to decry the Emmys. His breakdown over nearly being forced to cut off Carl's arm in "The Day Will Come When You Won't Be" deserves some mention.
- Negan fans are not happy that Jeffrey Dean Morgan was not considered for an award for his awesome work portraying the Lucille wielding psychopath.
Awesome Ego: Negan. He's such a Laughably Evil overpowered psychopath with enough charisma that the fans and the characters understand why he has what it takes to be in charge while praising himself as a Dark Messiah. To drive the point home, all of his followers shout "We are all Negan!"
Beta: You're too loud, too weak, too full of ego.
Negan: I mean, it's not ego if I really am that awesome.

Badass Decay:
- Andrea lost a lot of credibility in Season 3 after trying so hard to become a competent Action Girl. The moment she meets the Governor, she becomes infatuated with him and does absolutely everything he says without question, causing her to lash out against anyone who hates him despite the fact that he's so Obviously Evil.
- For some fans, Maggie has lost some of her awesomeness as the show went on. Back in Season 2, Maggie was an Affirmative Action Girl who could take care of herself and slayed more zombies than her entire family. Later, she now stays within Alexandria as a secretary to Deanna, before slightly raising her status as a lookout, and usually wishes her man to stay safe while he's on the front lines fighting. Possibly justified, since she's pregnant. However, she comes blazing back as a Pregnant Badass in "The Same Boat" when she and Carol rescue themselves from the Saviors and then proceed to kill every last one of them.
- The Wolves, who were once ominous trap masters that posed as an unknown threat towards Rick and Alexandria since they decimated multiple safe zones For the Evulz end up being revealed as stupid brutes who rush in killing people with blades and pointed sticks and were all wiped out within a few episodes.
- After an intimidating introduction, the Saviors spend almost all their screentime getting their asses kicked, hardly ever getting to fight back effectively until it's impossible to see them as a serious threat. The first five episodes after their formal introduction feature Rick's group slaughtering their out parties and decimating their compounds without a single casualty. The first kill scored by the Saviors isn't until the third to last episode of Season 6, where Dwight kills a minor character, Denise, and even then it was by accident as he was aiming for Daryl. However, they come back blazing in "Last Day on Earth" when they successfully capture Rick's group and cause some of them to cry.
- The Reapers start out as frightening spooks of antagonists, but when their backstory is revealed and almost none of them get any characterization, they soon devolve into competent, but boring and forgettable grunts.
Base-Breaking Character:
- Some fans hate T-Dog for being a Flat Character without much characterization or screen-time; others like or at least pity him because of it.
- Many fans think Shane makes a lot of good points and is a better overall leader than Rick while others think he's too callous, impulsive, uncompromising, selfish, and needlessly dickish, ultimately doing more harm than good. For what it’s worth, in latter seasons, Rick adopts much of his mentality but to far greater effect.
- Andrea. A valuable asset to the group and the only woman in early seasons to attempt to be more than a housewife, a reckless and overemotional Faux Action Girl with terrible taste in men, or a combination of both (for example, she eventually becomes a good shot, but fails at common sense when she nearly shoots Daryl and falls for the Governor)?
- Daryl has a massive fanbase, but also a sizable hatedom that think he's over-hyped and object to his increased Character Focus from the writers and Breakout Character status among fans. Not helping matters is how Tyreese, Abraham, and Jesus, who all held the position as Rick's Lancer at various points in the comics, were given smaller roles in the show, seemingly at the expense of Canon Foreigner Daryl filling the role instead. As of Season 7, his popularity has divided even further, now that he inadvertently got Glenn killed by punching Negan, even after Negan said he wouldn't tolerate such behavior. Some fans say Daryl isn't to blame and cut him some slack, while other find this a glaring case of Nice Job Breaking It, Hero, and believe that Daryl should've died instead of Glenn. His actions in Season 8, regarding his attempt to attack the Sanctuary and break with Rick’s plan, also caused quite a bit of heated debate among the fandom. When it was announced Andrew Lincoln would be leaving the show, even some of his fans were skeptical about Daryl taking over as lead, but reception has been overall pretty positive.
- Some find Beth sweet and love her singing. Others find her extremely irritating and useless.
- A lot of fans like Carol for her transformation from Shrinking Violet to One-Woman Army and praise her as a Pragmatic Hero who's will to make hard choices. On the other hand, many people feel her Pragmatic Villainy and Moral Myopia take her too far into Well-Intentioned Extremist territory for them to sympathize with and think her killing of Karen and David and threatening of Sam would be considered Moral Event Horizons if committed by another character. The last one especially has been looked at more critically after it was remembering Carol's threats toward him that at least partially caused Sam to break down in the middle of a dangerous situation and get eaten.
- Tyreese became a divisive figure in Season 5 by becoming a pacifist who not only refused to kill Martin—an unrepentant cannibal who threatened to snap baby Judith's neck—but concealed his survival from the rest of the group, allowing him to rejoin his fellow cannibals in hunting the group. By the time he dies in "What Happened and What's Going On", many viewers were satisfied that his adamant refusal to reconsider this stance meant he had no further purpose in the story.
- Some find Jessie a cute and calming love interest for Rick while others consider her boring, off limits because she's married, or simply prefer Rick either single or with Michonne. This is further complicated when they start a relationship immediately after Rick publicly executes her husband. Others don't object to the relationship itself but feel it suffers from Strangled by the Red String.
- Morgan, as of Season 6. Though still a well-loved badass, many fans dislike his newfound pacifism either for being repetitive (he's the fifth character after Dale, Hershel, Tyreese, and Father Gabriel to adopt this stance) or for being taken to Unintentionally Unsympathetic extremes like insisting on a non-lethal take-down for a murderous psychopath while innocent people are being slaughtered around him. Many also feel a 90-minute Day in the Limelight about his journey to pacifism was unnecessary Padding (and not just for drawing out a Cliffhanger). It's especially jarring considering he was one of the most popular characters of the entire show before Season 6 and his return to the main cast was extremely hyped up. He does manage to regain his popularity by the end of Season 7, however, after accepting that the Saviors must die (albeit at the cost of much of his sanity).
- Negan, in contrast to his comic counterpart's status as a near-universal fan favorite. Many fans love both the character and his portrayal on screen. Some love the character but feel that Jeffrey Dean Morgan lacks the intimidation and physicality necessary for the role. Others (particularly critics) despise Negan for his perceived one-dimensionality and cartoonishly over the top villainy. Some fans who are not familiar with the comic books see Negan as an outright Hate Sink character and a more sadistic and violent version of The Governor which makes sense considering the Adaptational Villainy around both characters. While his fanbase has grown due to him turning over a new leaf, forming friendships with Judith and Lydia, and killing Alpha there are still those who consider him irredeemable and refuse to accept his Heel–Face Turn on account of him brutally murdering Glenn and Abraham and showing little remorse for his cruel actions as Big Bad. However, fan reception seems to have considerably started leaning towards favorable after his Day in the Limelight backstory episode "Here's Negan".
- Tara: it seems fans either see her as a likeable and entertaining character with many funny moments or an extremely pointless one whose humor comes across as forced and who has not served any purpose in the story since Season 4. Then there's the matter of whether she deserved her Day in the Limelight episode from Season 7, which is generally considered one of the series' weakest episodes. She arguably improves in Season 9, but is unfortunately killed off by the Whisperers in the penultimate episode.
- Magna has fans for being a badass fan-favorite from the comics, but she has also received much derision for being generally hot-headed, unpleasant and somewhat selfish. While she was the front-runner of her group in the comics, she's been overshadowed in popularity by Yumiko, Kelly, Luke, and Connie who are all deemed much more likeable characters. Her hoarding supplies in the impoverished Hilltop with Kelly and her cold, biting actions towards Yumiko in Season 10 also earned her a lot of hate, though not hated enough to qualify as The Scrappy since she's otherwise a competent survivor in her own right.
- Leah had an uphill battle to get through once she was introduced as Daryl’s first canonical love interest, albeit entirely in flashbacks. In her debut episode, the fans who didn’t hate her for standing in the way of their ships were mostly neutral to moderately positive towards her, though even the non-shippers had mixed feelings towards her coming out of nowhere save for one offhand reference.^note In Season 11, reception to her became more polarized. The fact that her Reaper cohorts never get much development beyond bloodthirsty fundamentalism means we never see why we should care that Leah keeps losing her family, but few non-shippers actively hated her. She actually gets a shot at becoming an interesting, more personal antagonist, but it’s lost when both she and the Reapers end up killed before they can be developed any further; Leah unfortunately devolves into a cartoonish lust for vengeance by the end of her run. Besides the shippers, fans were split on whether she was a decent anti-villain or a weak villain.
Better on DVD: Several slower arcs or seasons of the series are considered more palatable on home release or streaming services.
- Season 2, easily the least well received season of the series for being slow-paced and featuring a seven episode long search for a missing group member, is considered less grating when you're able to binge watch it and not have to wait a week between episodes.
- With Scott Gimple taking over as showrunner from seasons 4-8, this also begins to apply to the series as a whole, since your favorite characters may not possibly appear for several weeks.
- Season 6 to 8, in particular, was better received for having a less slower pace when viewed consecutively, decreasing the agonizing wait for cliffhangers to be resolved (Like the "Dumpstergate" and the Negan kill).
- Season 10 was a unique case since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic forced the show to take an unplanned hiatus due to the world entering quarantine before post-production of the intended season finale "A Certain Doom" could finish. As "The Tower" was obviously not intended to be the season finale and was just set-up for it, it left many viewers unsatisfied with how the show was forced to leave things off for what was at the time an indefinite hiatus. Once "A Certain Doom" was released and eventually became available for home release or streaming, reception towards "The Tower" has mellowed out.
Broken Base:
- Rick's decision to exile Carol for killing David and Karen left some fans feeling he was completely justified while others felt it was hypocritical and arbitrary given that Rick's own hands are far from clean and he was later willing to make peace with the far more reprehensible Governor. Then there are those who believe he made the right choice but had no right to do so without consulting the group.
- Fans are also divided on the justifiability of the murder that led to the banishment. Some praise it as a hard but pragmatic decision for the greater good while others detest it as an atrocious Moral Event Horizon that only gets a pass from much of the fandom because it happens to Mauve Shirts. As something else to chew on, in Season 6, Rick (after a lot of Character Development and hardening since then) says that if she did it today, he would thank her for it and clearly deemed it a past mistake.
- Reaction to the Season 4 finale is split into three groups. Some found it boring with a dull or even narmy Cliffhanger. Others claim it was one of the best episodes of the season, with great Character Development and an amazing ending. Then there are those who don't hate the episode, but were really underwhelmed by the Anti-Climax (reinforced by the Season 5 premiere being a climactic fan-pleaser) and The Un-Twist that Terminus really was exactly what most fans thought.
- Immediately after it aired, fans were declaring the extended Season 5 finale either the best in the show's history or the most disappointing. Supporters found it thrilling and emotional while detractors thought it wasted its extended run-time on padding or just fell short of promises of dramatic tearjerker. Others thought it was fine but should have done more to introduce the Wolves.
- Rick's plan to deal with the Quarry Herd is a divisive topic. Half the fanbase thinks it was a necessary action and a good plan that failed only due to unforeseeable complications and that Rick's actions saved Alexandria from at least some of the walkers. The other half think he went about it all wrong and is completely to blame for the horde at the gates.
- Glenn's apparent death in "Thank You" created a kaleidoscope of opinions. At its core, fans either believed the character was really Devoured by the Horde or protected a body on top of them. Those who believed the character was dead either praised the scene as a well-written Tear Jerker that affirmed Anyone Can Die or criticized it as a pointless waste of a fan favorite for shock value. Meanwhile, those who believed the character was alive either praised the drama and enjoyed speculating on possible escapes or criticized it as gimmicky writing that would require serious Plot Armor to survive.
  - The decision to follow this Wham Episode with a 90-minute Bottle Episode, a Breather Episode episode full of minor characters, and a Day in the Limelight episode with only three of the main cast before resolving the Cliffhanger is either good drama, frustrating, or just tedious.
- Some think "Here's Not Here" is a great character-driven episode that bridged the gap between Morgan's current characterization and the one we saw in "Clear", some think it's a decent standalone but poorly placed in the middle of a major conflict that has the fates of several main characters hanging in the balance, and some think it was just pointless, cheesy Filler with an Ass Pull explanation for Morgan's new outlook. The decision to dedicate an entire 90-minute extended episode to it is also considered questionable.
- One thing the fans constantly argue about is whether the character's mistakes are believable or not. Some fans hate it whenever the characters do something that seems stupid, arguing that it's contrived writing for the sake of drama, and people who have been living in the apocalypse as long as they have shouldn't be making the kind of mistakes they do. Others argue that it's realistic stupidity, or that there were perfectly sensible reasons for not taking a certain course of action, and that living in the apocalypse isn't as easy as some people believe. One of the most reviled examples of this was the group's actions in "East", as six of the group's most capable fighters immediately leave Alexandria when they've all agreed that the Saviors are likely going to come knocking any day now. While characters leaving town in the following episode made more sense (as Maggie required medical aid from Hilltop), it's still seen as a clumsy plot device to get the group into the Saviors' clutches.
- Many fans also argue about the increasing amount of character deaths. Some fans are fine with the high mortality rate, as this is a show about a zombie apocalypse, meaning casualties will be high by default. Said fans also enjoy said deaths because they raise the stakes, result in further character development from the survivors, lead to shocking twists, and in some cases, eliminate characters who are Scrappies or too dumb to live. Others, however, are appalled that the show kills off characters right when they start getting interesting, or right when they start contributing to the plot. Said detractors also feel like characters are dying for no reason besides shock value or to make a series that is already suffering from being bleak even more depressing. Others counter this by arguing that for the most part, the only characters whose deaths contribute to this "increasing amount" are Red Shirts, Mauve Shirts, and villains, with most members of Rick's group being essentially safe unless the actor playing them leaves the show. Because of that, some feel that the minor characters are essentially only introduced for the purpose of being killed off later, whereas Rick's group (especially its more prominent members like Glenn pre-Season 7 and Daryl) have at times shown some truly ludicrous levels of Plot Armor.
- Carol's character arc in Season 6. After turning from a battered housewife into a badass survivor, Carol begins to regret all of the deaths she's caused, to the point that she leaves the group, because she's afraid she'll have to kill more people to protect them. Some feel it was a complete 180 personality change that negated all of her previous character development. Others believe that it did have proper build up, and that it makes sense that killing so many people would start to weigh on her. Still others think that the concept was good, but that it was rushed.
- A lot of people were not amused how Season 6 ended with a Cliffhanger at the moment where Negan killed a member of Rick's group but the viewers only see it from the victim's POV. There were some (and by some, so few that this trope barely counts) fans who wanted the season to end this way in order to up the suspense for Season 7, while there was an absolutely visceral response from others who are sick of cliffhangers and feel that the show dropped the ball on the scene. Scott Gimple, Robert Kirkman, and other showrunners' response to the backlash did not help matters, with their answers bordering on Viewers Are Morons and Misaimed Fandom, and claims that the audience shouldn't have expected actual pay-off to the season's plot.
  - The resolution in the Season 7 premiere inevitably led to this. People either admired the fact that they went with a very gutsy call in killing off both Abraham and Glenn, an event big enough to finally justify those seven months of buildup, or thought Abraham was a somewhat mediocre choice to be Negan's victim compared to the amount of buildup the scene received and Glenn being killed off soon after felt like a tacked-on Ass Pull, arguably cheapening the deaths of both characters. There's also the fact that Abraham's comic death, which happened only a couple episodes earlier, went to a minor character in the TV series. Is it really upping the ante to kill off two major characters if it came at the cost of another key moment? There's also been divisiveness on whether or not the show had finally gone too far with the carnage in the premiere, even among fans who knew what to expect.
  - In a somewhat ironic turn of events, the actual fan reaction (both to the Cliffhanger and the resolution) has been subjected to this as well. On the one side, you have fans who side with the showrunners and say that this is not the first time the show has included a cliffhanger in the season finale (most citing the Terminus storyline that encompassed the Season 4 finale and the Season 5 premiere), this is simply the most overt example. Others say that the fan reaction was completely justified as it was such an iconic scene in the comics (and for the reasons stated above). Now that the fire has died down, some fans have moved to Take a Third Option territory, saying that the cliffhanger was frustrating but, in hindsight, the sheer level of anger displayed bordered on being embarrassing after the fact.
- Season 6 overall received the most mixed and divisive reception since Season 2. Some fans give it points for killing off numerous Mauve Shirts and Red Shirts, having characters like Eugene, Gabriel, and the Alexandrians take a level in badass and introducing the notorious Saviors as the main antagonists of the series. However, it also has many detractors for its occasionally slow pace, stupid character decisions, and numerous narrative gimmicks and copouts - in particular, Dumpstergate and the Negan cliffhanger.
- While Carol and Daryl's relationship is one of the main praises of the show, the exact nature of it is a source of splitting among the fanbase due to some Alternate Character Interpretation. Some think that they're definitely going to end up as a couple at some point, since they've already somewhat flirted with each other. Others believe that their relationship is more like platonic life partners, always there for one another without being romantically involved. While arguments can get heated sometimes, the majority of fans take a third option, deciding that they don't care whether or not Daryl and Carol end up together.
- There is actually very little left of the tone of the original few seasons that focused more on ordinary people learning to adapt and survive After the End more than the walkers and outside threats themselves. For example, the closest thing we had to a main villain for two seasons was Shane, and he actually had a considerable amount of fan support compared to the idealistic Rick of Seasons 1 and 2 who seemed unable by many to make the tough calls. Those of whom that miss this style can be found on every Walking Dead forum whenever something they perceive to be particularly narmful regarding Negan or the Kingdom arises, and arguing with the fans who prefer the new more action-heavy, comic book loyal direction of the show.
- Are characters like Negan, Ezekiel, and Jadis believable as real people living in a post apocalyptic world? Negan and Ezekiel are at least seen as somewhat ridiculous by other characters (and Ezekiel outright confirms he only acts his part for the positive effect it has on others) but does that justify their inclusion or do they still clash with the show's generally bleak tone and setting? Jadis, meanwhile, is apparently meant to be taken 100% seriously, which has made her a major source of Narm for many. While there are many fans who enjoy these characters, others feel they are too "comic book-y"^note and don't fit in well with the more grounded show.
- Season 7 in general, particularly the finale. Either it's a great "true" introduction to Negan and the Saviors and demonstrates just how dangerous they are (especially after their less than impressive appearances throughout the previous season), a good character-driven season that hearkened back to the style of the first couple of seasons, and introduces some fascinating new communities (particularly the Kingdom); or it's mostly made up of needless padding, filler episodes that accomplish very little, and is just there to set up all the pieces necessary to lead into All Out War in Season 8. Some fans Take a Third Option and say that while there may be a lot of filler and the number of bottle episodes was perhaps a few too many, it also provided a lot of good character development for many and that Negan and the Saviors needed a season to set themselves up as the Big Bad after their divisive appearances in Season 6.
  - Similarly for the season finale: a tense and moving episode that signaled a return to form, and a fitting tribute to all three of the major characters who left the show this season? Or a predictable and melodramatic finale with too much time spent on a character who ended up dead halfway through the episode, leaving barely any time for the action?
  - Negan not having any F-bombs on the Season 7 DVD, despite the Season 6 Blu-Ray version having this in its finale. There are Negan fans are completely angry and livid that the one important trait that defines him has been omitted, and makes his appearances from Seasons 6 and 7 inconsistent, while there are those who don't mind, and felt that the swearing in the Season 6 finale felt forced.
- Daryl’s rogue strike on the Sanctuary was the cause of severely heated debate in the fandom. Many fans at least saw his point that Rick’s plans don’t always go perfectly and understood where he was coming from, but many fans hated how Daryl acted so bullheaded and wanted to blow the Sanctuary to hell and Rick’s plan with it. Daryl insisting it worked without sticking around to watch the results, and the show going out of its way to assure Daryl it wasn’t his fault (Rosita literally spends a scene saying it’s okay and everyone makes mistakes even when they’re on the run from Saviors, and Dwight and Simon both insist it was Eugene) rubbed a lot of people the wrong way as well, seeing it as a Creator's Pet treatment.
- The reveal of Carl having been bitten in "How It's Gonna Be" and dying in the following episode. Was it completely unnecessary, going against his comic counterpart and wasting any potentially interesting storylines in the future for him? Or was it a solid, amazing game-changer for the show's future, offering a decent character death that had been sorely lacking in all of Season 8, and greatly demonstrating its pros at diverging from the source material and telling a different story?
- Hoo boy, the Season 8 finale "Wrath" was obviously going to be this, as it concluded the Saviors conflict that had lasted for two and a half seasons. There were haters who trashed the episode for not killing Negan (even though the murders he had committed warranted this fate), the lack of main character deaths, and plot twists, like Eugene sabotaging the Saviors' bullets and Maggie, Daryl and Jesus conspiring to kill Negan when they have the chance, effectively defying Rick's orders. On the other hand, some loved it for the mere fact that most of the characters, including the Saviors themselves, achieved their happy endings, the payoff of the "mercy" theme throughout the season by having Rick spare and imprison Negan, the plot twists being genuinely surprising to them, as well as its final, emotional scene with Rick and a young Carl walking together.
- And now comes Rick's "death" in Season 9 that was advertised for weeks and set up as a definitive end for the character only to have him survive at the end. But that isn't the controversial part, at least not entirely, because according to Scott Gimple on the Talking Dead, this was done to make a series of made for TV movies featuring him. This is either a fantastic outcome if you want to see more of this character, and one that fantastically averts the Death in the Limelight trope the show has been repeatedly using for minor and major characters; it makes a mockery of what could have been an awesome and heroic sacrifice; or is it just another nail in the coffin for this show's Suspension of Disbelief? Rick survives being impaled through the stomach by dirty rebar, loses pints of blood, falls off a horse, takes an explosion to the face, avoids drowning in a high current river, and then just so happens to be in the right place at the right time to be airlifted to safety.
- Depending who you ask, "A Certain Doom" is either a solid, crowd-pleasing, emotionally resonant conclusion to the Whisperers arc that was totally worth waiting through the episode's unexpected six-month hiatus ^note; or it's a rushed, predictable, and frustratingly anti-climactic disappointment with no real stakes that wasn't worth the long wait. Then there's a third party who thinks the episode is fine but agree it could have benefitted from a longer runtime.

Can't Un-Hear It: Andrew Lincoln as Rick, Chandler Riggs as Carl, Steven Yeun as Glenn, Lennie James as Morgan, Jon Bernthal as Shane, Lauren Cohan as Maggie, the late Scott Wilson as Hershel, David Morrissey as The Governor, Danai Gurira as Michonne, Michael Cudlitz as Abraham, Josh McDermitt as Eugene, Christian Serratos as Rosita, Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Negan, Khary Payton as Ezekiel, Ryan Hurst as Beta, Paola Lázaro as Princess, and Michael James Shaw as Mercer. Good luck trying not to hear their voices next time you read the comic.
Captain Obvious Reveal:
- Season 4 has a minor subplot about characters wondering what Daryl did before the apocalypse. Eventually, it's revealed that he was... just some drifter who followed Merle around and did what he said, which is exactly what most people assumed before the writers tried to make a mystery out of it.
- Very few people were surprised to find out Terminus was a hoax all along. Even before the reveal aired, 89% of the people who voted on what they thought predicted it would be worse than Woodbury.
- Almost the moment Dumpstergate began, fans began to cry He's Just Hiding, so the ultimate resolution of the cliffhanger became this.
- Glenn and Abraham were among the most predicted victims of Negan going into the Season 7 premiere, the former because he suffered the same fate in the comics and the latter because many felt he was on borrowed time due to being Spared by the Adaptation. Subverted somewhat in that not too many expected it to be both of them.
- Admittedly, Spencer's death was seen coming a mile away even by fans who don't read the comics. Considering that said character was just a background extra who suddenly received a load of character development and was growing into a threat towards The Hero while an unhinged Hero Killer was conveniently walking around slaughtering a few competent characters at the same time, which has been done on the show before, some people weren't that surprised. Though, the real surprise was Olivia's Surprisingly Sudden Death since she was still alive in the comics and made it through the Savior War arc.
- Due to the perceived Anvilicious nature of Season 8, not many were surprised by the plot twists of the finale, since the show hadn’t been subtle about foreshadowing them - namely Eugene pulling a last-minute redemptive save, Rick sparing Negan to honor Carl’s last wishes, and Oceanside arriving to provide some aid in the final battle.
Cargo Ship:
- Glenn and the dumpster, because of how the latter basically saved the former's life.
- Negan and Lucille have just as much of a weird relationship as they did in the comics. The first time we see Negan carrying Lucille, he gently holds his weapon in his only gloved hand so he wouldn't make skin contact with it, he tells Rick's group that it's considered an honor to be picked by her, and he personally describes Lucille as "awesome" in a very sexual tone while brandishing her. Considering that he named Lucille in honor of his late wife, it's pretty much canon.
- Carl and the Sheriff hat.
- Some of the characters with their signature weapons, such as Rick with his Colt Python and Daryl with his crossbow.
Catharsis Factor:
- While it's a tragic scene, seeing Rick kill Shane can provide this since finally, Rick has shut up Shane's constant nagging and grumbling about how he's unfit to lead.
- The death of The Governor after all the atrocities he'd committed, including killing Hershel in front of his friends and family.
- Seeing the Claimers dispatched by Rick, Daryl and Michonne after gleefully trying to kill them and rape Carl. In particular, Rick biting out Joe's throat and stabbing Carl's attempted rapist Dan to death while he pathetically begs for his life.
- Seeing the Terminus cannibals brutally wiped out via walker-feasting, burning to death, and eventually by way of Rick's machete is very satisfying after they herded the group like animals and smugly ate Bob's leg in front of him.
  - Bob manages to pull off his own catharsis factor. Turns out the Terminus cannibals are not so sanguine about eating infected people.
- In a twisted way, it's actually pretty awesome to see Rick undergo some severe Break the Haughty as he's forced to kneel before Negan, after he'd grown a massive ego when it came to dealing with the Saviors and was just taunting resident psychopath Simon like he was nothing.
- The Season 7 finale and a chunk of Season 8 revolves around AHK dealing a lot of Humiliation Conga to the Saviors as retribution for years of torture and subjugation. From seeing the Sanctuary run low on food and water immediately without a stream of supplies from their slave states, to prominent Savior generals like Simon, Regina, and Gavin forced to suffer severe losses, it's often very satisfying to see the Saviors laid so low.
- After almost two seasons of Jared being an annoying, psychotic and smug asshole who repeatedly taunts Richard and Morgan, kills Benjamin despite being ordered to kill Richard, and only receives minor punishments for his behavior and actions, seeing Morgan kick him into a room full of walkers and lock the gate while Jared pleads for his life as he is devoured is incredibly cathartic.
- Even without watching this show, just check out Simon's entry in the Complete Monster section and you'll see why Negan publicly beating and strangling him to death in a Trial by Combat was so satisfying.
- Maggie finally having Gregory executed after putting up with years of his bullshit.
- For those fans opposed to Rick's decision to spare Negan, hearing Daryl vent the frustrations they'd been feeling since the end of Season 8. The following episode one-ups this with Maggie chewing out Michonne for her part in it as well.
- Seeing Gabriel stab the murdering, psychotic Whisperer that is Dante to death is immensely satisfying.
- It's hard not to cheer when Negan kills Alpha, especially since she stuck ten people's heads on pikes and thought she was just on her way to kill her own daughter.
- Seeing Connie and Kelly reunited after the former had been presumed dead in a cave-in, stuck for days in the Whisperers' walker horde, and nearly devoured by a bunch of feral cannibals residing in a mansion. It's especially satisfying considering what happened the last time two sisters (Maggie and Beth) had been separated for a prolonged period of time; it's nice to see this kind of storyline get a happy ending for a change.
- After we learn of how depraved and evil Pope and his Reapers are - and how obnoxiously blind Leah is about them - it's nothing short of satisfying to see Maggie's group whittle through their ranks one by one. Particularly noteworthy is the demise of Welles, who is cut down eerily similar to how Jesus was killed, providing Maggie a way to posthumously avenge him; and Carver, the most sadistic Reaper who is broken down after being a pompous ass to his enemies and finally receives a gory death.
- Seeing Daryl stab Lance through the hand after all the shit he's pulled is very satisfying, especially since Lance had just been saved from death due to Carol having worked out a deal with Pamela to have him take the fall for Sebastian's crimes in exchange for her friends' safety. It's also satisfying seeing Pamela knock him down a peg by calling him a little man in way over his head.
- Sebastian's death. After his blackmail resulted in forty people losing their lives and him generally being a pompous Smug Snake who never had to suffer consequences due to being the son of Governor Milton, seeing him pathetically beg for help while a walker violently tears his throat out is hands down one of the most gratifying moments in the series. More so if you're aware that he kills Rick in the source material and was only sent to prison instead, meaning his death is cathartic even without Rick still around on the show.
- The death of the Warden, who put the Coalition members to work in slave labor camps and attempted to have a pregnant woman shot to punish her husband Negan. He receives his due justice in the form of having his face eaten off by the only trooper willing to die for him, at the hands of the very pissed off Mama Bear Rosita, whose baby the Commonwealth took hostage and is still missing.
Complete Monster: See here.
Continuity Lockout: The show is heavily serialized, features a massive revolving door cast who frequently die and evolve, changes locations occasionally, has had four showrunners with different styles, and each season takes about five months to air, divided by a seven month hiatus, so new viewers really ought to watch the show in chronological order from the first episode unless they want to be confused.
Crazy Is Cool: Negan. He's an Ax-Crazy Cloudcuckoolander with an army of badass bikers and delivers a "Reason You Suck" Speech every time he beats someone to a blood pulp with his baseball bat covered in barbed wire, who he imagines is like a real person to talk to.
Creepy Awesome: The walkers. They have some of the most nightmarish designs, devour major characters once a season, and surprisingly pose as a credible threat against the more badass characters when in groups. It definitely helps that they don't suffer the same (literal) Villain Decay they have in the comics.
Creepy Cute: Surprisingly, some of the walkers have a huge amount of chibi art and plush dolls among the fandom.
Critical Dissonance:
- Critics loved Season 4B for its heavy focus on fleshing out characters and their backstories. Many fans, however, loathed the slow pace and wished some of the episodes were trimmed altogether to reduce the Padding.
- "Them" is considered one of the series' most forgettable episodes since it is the big recovery episode with everyone mourning the group's recently lost loved ones and dire straits. However, it would appear to be one of the cast's favorite episodes to film, as pictures from the set of the episode crop up quite often on the cast's various social media accounts; i.e. this still◊ is one of the most shared set photos of the entire series.
- "Here's Not Here" had universal acclaim from critics, yet has mixed reception from the fan base as seen above in Broken Base.
Crossover Ship:
- There is still quite a vocal minority of fans who wish (or wished, given the character's death in Season 8) to see Carl end up with Clementine from The Walking Dead videogame, despite the likelihood of these two characters being from separate universes.
- Thanks to a joke about Negan's attractiveness from Cassandra Peterson on Talking Dead, fans now like to joke about Negan and Elvira, Mistress of the Dark ending up together.
Crosses the Line Twice; Half of Negan's actions. Its just so cruel and said at the worst possible time such as making a pun about how Lucille is a vampire bat after violently smashing in Glenn and Abraham's heads or torturing Daryl by playing hilariously upbeat music to prevent him from sleeping. And yet the cruelty, combined with Jeffrey Dean Morgan's delivery means you will find it almost as hilarious as it is horrifying.
Cry for the Devil:
- Despite how despicable the Governor is, it's hard not to feel bad for him when he's sobbing over his daughter's corpse.
- The backstory of the Terminus Hunters can be very upsetting, making it easier to sympathize with them and understand why they became what they did.
- Ron turns out to be as spiteful and unpleasant as his father, as well as having inherited his mental instability, but it's pretty easy to feel sorry for him seeing him watch his little brother and mother die horrific deaths in front of him. The kid looks like he's barely fighting back tears even as he moves to attack Rick.
- It's hard not to feel at least a little bad for Negan when we finally see the event that broke him: returning from a six-week scouting trip to discover that his wife has committed suicide and is now a walker, meaning his efforts were All for Nothing.

Designated Hero:
- Rick crosses into this a few times throughout the series, with some of his actions being no different in nature from those of the Governor or even Negan. Tara, a former ally of The Governor, has a negative reaction to him ordering the group to "kill them all" in "Not Tomorrow Yet". In the following episode, the Saviors even call out the group on this and insist that they are no better than them.
- Rick also got this accusation thrown at him back in Seasons 1 and 2. Many of the debates from those days center around who would have made the better leader between the idealistic Rick and the dark pragmatism of Shane, with many believing that Rick's traditional heroics were just laughably naive in the face of such carnage and that the show was deliberately going out of its way to paint Shane in a bad light, particularly over the barn full of walkers. Many of these arguments can still be read over on the Headscratchers page.
Designated Love Interest: Sasha to Abraham. She hasn't shown a single hint of a deep romantic interest in him, but all of a sudden Sasha becomes the love of Abraham's life after a small amount of interaction. Many actually found it jarring that he cruelly broke up with Rosita just to begin chasing after Sasha. In "Twice As Far", Abe finally grows up a bit, more or less reconciles with Rosita, and apologizes to Sasha for feeling Entitled to Have You. However, the ship began to lose some of whatever popularity it had attained when after Abraham's death, Sasha compares her relationship to Maggie and Glenn's, who've had years to grow into the compassionate couple they're know for while these two didn't have much onscreen development in their relationship and don't receive anymore since Abraham is killed off before the two could progress any further. Sasha is also rather insensitive towards Rosita after Abe's death since she declares she will be taking his body to bury at Hilltop where she'll be staying, which feels like a slap in the face to the similarly grieving Rosita even if they weren't together anymore. It's also telling that really the only peek into the two's relationship comes during a flashback before Abraham's death and during Sasha's own.
Die for Our Ship:
- As of "Find Me", Leah has predictably come under fire for being Daryl's first official canon love interest. The biggest complaint is how the relationship was shown over the span of one episode and happened with a character who we'd only just met while Daryl has already spent multiple seasons building up sufficient Ship Tease with both Carol and Connie that fans had actually gotten invested in. It doesn't help when the series ends without Daryl getting together with either of the latter two which, along with the fact that the Reapers arc was accused of being Trapped by Mountain Lions and Angela Kang implying that Daryl/Connie would have become canon had the show had gone on longer, leads many fans to decry the Daryl/Leah pairing as being an infuriating and monumental waste of time.
- A lot of the people that ship Rick and Michonne feel this way about Jessie. And Jessie dies at the mid-Season 6 premiere. Then Rick and Michonne officially hook up in the next episode.
- Tobin's sudden romance with Carol put him on the shitlist for the many fans who would rather she get together with Daryl. It happened again when Carol officially got together with Ezekiel.
Draco in Leather Pants: Most antagonists become this to some degree but Shane, The Governor, and Negan are easily the standout examples.
- Some fans even consider Shane an Anti-Hero because he adapted to the new world quicker than the rest of the group... this despite the fact that he shot Otis to leave as bait for walkers and tried to kill Rick (his best friend) because he believed he was better than him and entitled to Lori's affections.
- The Governor and especially Negan are often painted as leaders who merely did what they had to do to keep their people safe and some viewers insist the audience would have a completely different perspective if the story had been told from their POV instead of Rick's. While both of these things might be true up to a point, The Governor was also shown to be willing to gun down someone simply for believing they could be a threat to his power, while Negan ordered the Saviors to kill one person from each new group on sight and sadistically murdered Glenn and Abraham while forcing their loved ones to watch. While Rick's group slaughtering Negan's outpost was indeed a questionable move on Rick's part, saying Negan is entirely in the right ignores how he was forcing communities to bow to him while letting his soldiers run amok terrorizing the residents at every opportunity or how he coerced women into being his wives. Rick outright states this to be the case in the Season 8 finale.
  Rick: This isn't about who you killed. No, we killed people. This is about [...] How you made people live for you. How you put people under your boot.
- Some fans show a remarkable amount of unwarranted sympathy for the various Savior soldiers, with some willing to defend them as good people who lost their souls to Negan (some going so far as to claim certain Asshole Victim’s like Dean were actually tearjerker-worthy that their victims felt bad about killing). This ignores how many of the Saviors relentlessly bully and terrorize AHK without needing any prompting from Negan or their commanders; for a few examples, Arat showed a childish glee taunting a boy she was killing, Gavin evidently tried to swindle Ezekiel out of extra supplies enough that Ezekiel felt the need to personally count his tribute during each meeting, and Dean went out of his way to destroy prenatal pills that Maggie would’ve surely needed to spite her. Several Savior soldiers did prove they could change for the better, but these fans show a disturbing ability to sweep numerous atrocities under the rug when it’s clear many of the Saviors were genuinely bad people to the core.

Epileptic Trees:
- Since the beginning, some fans have speculated that the series finale will reveal that the whole show was All Just a Dream while Rick was still in the hospital in a coma. However, Robert Kirkman explicitly Jossed this shortly after the premiere of Season 5, and, half a year later, the premiere of a companion series that has nothing to do with Rick pounded more nails into the theory's coffin.
- Speculation ran wild over the mysterious helicopter patrolling Atlanta in "Days Gone Bye" and Season 2 before the plot was ended in "Walk With Me."
- Nate was a Bit Part Bad Guy from Season 2 who tried to kill Rick's group for murdering his friends Dave and Tony, but got away in his truck and was never seen again. However, another character named Nate who drives a truck and wants to avenge the death of his friends is seen in The Walking Dead videogame. Some fans have interpreted these two as the exact same villain becoming an Ascended Extra as the Big Bad of the 400 Days DLC.
- Many viewers believed the leader of the rapists who sacked Terminus was in fact an Early-Bird Cameo of Negan, based on his appearance and Faux Affably Evil tendencies. AMC had to step in clarify that this was not the case.
- Enid has been a constant source of increasingly irrational fan speculation regarding her loyalties ever since her first appearance. Initially, many believed she was the TV counterpart of Lydia, and that the W-group was the Whisperers, and then that she was a mole for the Wolves, even after her flashback in "JSS." Since then, some fans continued to mark her as anything from a Savior to a Hilltop resident to a Kingdom resident to a member of some other as-yet unencountered group. Apparently the idea that she is simply an unfortunate teenager who was alone between the time of her parents' death and her arrival at Alexandria is the craziest theory of all.
- In "No Way Out", there was a Blooper in which a car, probably driven by a local resident or looky-loo, appears in the far background in a blink and you'll miss it moment right before the Saviors get rocket launcher'ed by Daryl. This inspired all kinds of speculation about other Saviors, possibly even Negan himself being in the car.
- Many people also believe that Simon is actually Trevor from Grand Theft Auto V working under Negan in a false identity.
Evil Is Cool: While most of the series' villains are too despicable and/or pathetic to find cool, these few manage to be the outlier.
- Negan. Jeffrey Dean Morgan wasted no time trying to maintain the dark coolness of the villain. Negan appears for the very first time stepping from literally out of the shadows, brandishing an awesome weapon, and proceeds to give Rick's group an epic "The Reason You Suck" Speech before offing not one, but two of their group members in front of them.
- Beta. Ryan Hurst makes him as terrifying and badass he was in the comics, as his fight scene with Daryl undisputedly shows. His rampage through Alexandria in "Stalker" basically turns him into Michael Myers for an episode, and it is awesome.
- Carver is a total Jerkass who many fans couldn't wait to see get his inevitable comeuppance. However, his excellent fight scene wherein he demolishes Maggie, Negan, and a wounded Elijah all at once definitely earns him a spot here.
Expectation Lowerer: Gregory. The man is a selfish, egotistical, immoral, greedy, perverted, phony coward who lives to be hated by the audience. He pretty much represents everything wrong about humanity in such an atrocious way that he makes Negan look like a Shakespearian villain.

Fan Nickname: Several so far, either from the internet or from tie-in show Talking Dead:
- Hershel's God shotgun from Beside The Dying Fire — Hershel fired many more shots from his shotgun than is possible without reloading.
- Rick's dictatorship was coined "Ricktatorship" by fans.
- The walker bomb from Home — the Governor sent a truck full of walkers crashing through the prison's front gate.
- The sex garage — Maggie pulled Glenn into a garage and... just guess.
- Despite only appearing in one episode, Clara immediately earned the moniker Creepy Clara.
- Merle is called Captain Hook.
- Tim, the Asian Woodbury Mook, is called "Evil Glenn" or "Anti-Glenn".
- Some fans have taken to calling Oscar from the prison "2-Dog" or "O-Dog" due to his joining Rick's group almost immediately after T-Dog's death. Once Tyreese, the character T-Dog is based from in the comics, finally appeared, there are some fans who called him Ty-Dog or True-Dog.
- The Termites for the group of survivors inhabiting Terminus, though they end up being unofficially dubbed the Hunters like their comic counterparts in early Season 5 (as Gareth offhandedly says they've become hunters).
- Pete in Season 5 is widely known as "Porchdick." He's introduced sitting on a porch. And he's a dick. Corey Brill even sings "The Ballad of Porchdick." After his son Ron Took a Level in Jerkass in Season 6, many fans now label him as "Porchdick Jr."
- Carol has been called with various nicknames ever since she Took a Level in Badass while getting increasingly darker to the point of Memetic Psychopath. Ranging from Assassin Carol for dressing like Ezio in "JSS", to Darth Carol and Terminator Carol for her willingness and generally low hesitation to kill.
- Before his actual name was revealed in the Season 7 premiere, Simon was dubbed "Trevor", due to being portrayed by Steven Ogg (aka Trevor Philips). It helps that his overall personality matches with Trevor's personality.
- The Scavengers have a number of these, including the Garbage Pail Kids, the Heapsters, the Junkyard Gang, the Dark Elves, the Garbage People, and the Trash People.
- "Alexandria Resident 9," the last (and currently longest-living) unnamed survivor of Alexandria identified via the Walking Dead Wiki.
- The Commonwealth soldiers are frequently called "Stormtroopers" because, well...◊ This trend popped up back when they were introduced in the comic, and it had only escalated upon the Commonwealth soldiers coming to big screen.
- Fans have compared Lance Hornsby to Saul Goodman due to both characters being Sharp Dressed Men with a somewhat snaky demeanor.
Fandom Rivalry: Toward the middle of Season 6, a hatedom for Into the Badlands arose from AMC's blatant and frustrating attempts to make their new show piggyback on TWD's ratings by pushing back Talking Dead until after Badlands and delaying the mid-season Stinger until Badlands' first commercial break.
Fan Fic Fuel: Several examples.
- Filling in the gap caused by the Time Skip's between Seasons 2-3 and 3-4, between the halves of Season 5, or between "No Way Out" and "The Next World".
- Detailing the Start of Darkness for any of the villains, especially Terminus.
- Imagining how the story would go if Shane was the leader of the group, especially when pitted against antagonists like The Governor or Negan (Word of God, however, is that if Shane had led the group during the Woodbury War, he would've led a forward assault that would've gotten everyone killed).
- The fate of Morales, until his return in Season 8, that is.
- The mystery of the helicopter seen in the first two seasons.
- And of course detailing the apocalypse around the world.
- Pitting two groups of antagonists against each other in a war just to see who would come out on top, especially the larger groups like Woodbury and the Saviors.
- Amusingly, after a Saturday Night Live sketch parodying Negan's arrival only with Dave Chappelle playing Negan and his various characters replacing Rick's group, some fans have begun to ponder what the show would be like if it really did star Chapelle's characters surviving the apocalypse together. Some fans have also wondered what Biggums and the gang did to piss off that version of Negan that much.
Fanon Discontinuity:
- There exist extremely scornful fans who refuse to acknowledge anything of the show outside its first season thanks to the behind the scenes Executive Meddling surrounding Frank Darabont's firing and Season 2's widely-perceived drop in quality.
- Most of the massive drop in ratings and views came after the Season 6 finale and the Season 7 premiere, whose events made others stop Walking Dead right away.
- Among the disgruntled, there are a few common Fanon Grand Finale's:
  - "The Distance," in which Rick's group arrives at the Alexandria Safe-Zone and presumably lives Happily Ever After.
  - "No Way Out" is the second most popular candidate. With the exception of the scenes where Daryl, Sasha, and Abraham encounter the Saviors, most of the story arcs tie up pretty well. Rick and Morgan have reunited; Glenn and Maggie are expecting a child; Eugene, Gabriel, and all of Alexandria take a level in badass, proving to Rick that they will step up and fight for their home when they have to; Carl survives his gunshot wound to the eye, and this, along with the aforementioned badassery displayed by the Alexandrians, gives Rick hope that they can build for the future, a future he vows to share with Carl and his Family of Choice.
  - "Wrath", to a lesser extent. Negan is defeated and the surviving Saviors have surrendered to form a partnership with the Coalition. Carl is dead, but Rick has a new sense of purpose and vows to carry on his legacy. The only lingering thread is Maggie, Daryl, and Jesus plotting to one day kill Negan behind Rick's back.
- Some fans gave up watching the show after Andrew Lincoln departed the show due to being unwilling to watch it without the main character.
- There are some, mostly shippers, who have chosen to erase "Find Me" from their minds due to it introducing Daryl's first canon love interest as a new character with almost no prior bearing on the story^note. While the pairing does not negate the possibility of any future ships happening later on down the line it does put a dent in the hopes of those who hoped to see such an event unfold organically rather than over the course of a single episode and with a character who the audience had actually had the time to grow attached to. Season 11 throws quite the monkey wrench into this since Leah returns as a major character, but the shippers can at least take comfort that relationship is off the table by episode 8.
Fan-Preferred Couple:
- While the canon Rick and Michonne are popular, there is a group just as big, if not bigger, that ships Rick with Daryl due to the fact that they are two of the most recurring characters in the show and the chemistry between them. On AO3, for example, Rick/Daryl has more fics than any other pairing and it still has a following even after Rick left the show.
- Rick and Negan are also popular, with over 1400 fics being written about them on AO3, and that's not including the tumblr blog posts.
- Daryl/Beth is easily more popular than Beth's canon pairing's with Jimmy and Zach. While her death took this off the canonical table, it has not stopped them from becoming the most popular heterosexual Daryl Dixon ship on AO3, with the most fanworks featuring them. The popularity skyrocketed after the events of Season 4 brought them together, with fanworks and fanart flooding the internet before and after Beth's death.
- Daryl/Carol is more popular than her canon pairing with Tobin. She and Daryl are a popular choice due to their copious amounts of Ship Tease and the overall ambiguous state of their relationship — they're obviously very close, and it's generally agreed that their interactions are great whether they're intended romantically or not. It's surely helped by the fact that Daryl and Carol are the show's two main Breakout Characters in their own right, and a lot of fans would like their relationship to develop further just to see them get even more focus. They ultimately end the show as Platonic Life-Partners, and Carol calls Daryl her best friend.
- Thanks to some Les Yay, the two becoming very close, and Tara's occasional leering at Rosita, Tara and Rosita are the most popular pairing for both. It is far more popular than Rosita's canon ones with Abraham, Gabriel, and Siddiq (who she has a kid with) and Tara with any of her canon girlfriends.
Fans Prefer the New Her: Michonne's post second Time Skip look in Season 9 earned her even more fan appreciation.
Faux Symbolism: Discussed in regards to Paul "Jesus" Rovia. Jesus himself claims that the fact that he Looks Like Jesus is the only reason people call him that and that there's no deeper meaning to the nickname.
First Installment Wins: The first season is considered to be this in certain circles due to show creator Frank Darabont, so much that they downright ignore everything after that due to all the controversy from Darabont's sacking after said season.
Foe Yay Shipping: A surprising amount of people have emerged shipping Maggie and Negan of all people, feeling that a number of their interactions in the first part of Season 11 reek of Slap-Slap-Kiss and Belligerent Sexual Tension. It also doesn't hurt that their actors previously played Batman's parents. It's outright No Yay to pretty much everyone else, however, given that Negan brutally murdered Maggie's husband Glenn and spoke about coercing Maggie into being one of the women in his Harem. Regardless, chatter about a potential romantic storyline became loud enough that showrunner Angela Kang had to personally step in confirming this would not actually be the case.
Fountain of Memes:
- Pretty much everything that Daryl and Abraham say or do will result in a popular joke about their characters. Carol and Negan have become this as well.
- Shane has become one in recent years (especially on TikTok), thanks in large part to Jon Bernthal's energetic performance and memorable lines.
Franchise Original Sin: The show's regular use of Bottle Episodes, which, for better or worse, have become near-ubiquitous since Season 7, can be traced back to the massive critical success of Season 4B. What later seasons don't take into account is that 4B worked so well because it followed a period of highly-serialized storytelling, and the subdued pace and emphasis of character development was seen as a new and fresh (if not desperately needed) direction in which to take the show. The episodes also followed single narrative threads to emphasize that the character pockets were separated from and had no way of contacting or finding one another, contributing to a heightened tone of isolation and despair, while later Bottle Episodes tend to follow characters/groups who happen to be alone in locations for regular, story-related reasons (with a few exceptions, such as "Slabtown" or "The Cell").
- Bottle Episodes had previously been used in the two Governor episodes from 4A, as well as in Season 3's critically acclaimed "Clear," which only features Rick, Carl, Michonne, and Morgan. None other than the very first episode, "Days Gone Bye," partially qualifies, as it is very slow-paced and, except for the beginning and the end, there are only three characters: Rick, who spends a lot of time wandering around alone, and Morgan and Duane.
Friendly Fandoms: Many Walking Dead fans are also fans of the Marvel Cinematic Universe due to the shared presence of several Walking Dead alumni as important characters in the Marvel franchise, including but not limited to Danai Gurira, Jon Bernthal, Michael Rooker, Ross Marquand, Lauren Ridloff, etc.

Genius Bonus: As noted by Hollywood Reporter shortly after the episode's airing, the way the group is led through Terminus in "A" is extremely reminiscent of how cattle are led to slaughter in real life.
"If you research how cattle are killed, the optimum approach is to have them take a series of corner turns before getting close — if they see they’re being led to slaughter, chaos ensues. The camera follows Rick and company in a circular route through Terminus until they get out into the clearing. Cattle are also, as they near slaughter, guided in single file — something Gareth did meticulously with each character, leading them to the railroad/cattle car in the short distance. There is also a 'correct handler position for driving cattle' — and director Michelle MacLaren set up the final scene by positioning Gareth in a perfect, textbook handler position... She also created maximum tension by showing the distance between Carl... Proper handling procedures also indicate that calves go last (or, if you will, parents go first — reversing it causes panic and a chance the cattle will disperse)... cattle go forward in a single-file line but shouldn’t actually see livestock in front of them — which is why Glenn and Maggie and the others were shunted to the rear of the car."
Growing the Beard: has happened several times as the show has grown in scope and depth over the years
- While the first season was good, the series came into its own in season two as the adaptation's began to find the right balance between nods to the comics and embracing its greater focus on multidimensional characters and human dynamics, and its major themes like Living Is More than Surviving and "Where is the line between I Did What I Had to Do and the Moral Event Horizon?" began to coalesce.
- It's amazing how many characters Took a Level in Badass between the end of Season 2 and the beginning of Season 3. Even Carl, Carol, and Lori are finally pulling their own weight, and many other complaints about the first two seasons also vacated the premises.
- Many TV critics welcomed the character focus of Season 4 (especially its second half) as something the show sorely needed.
- Those who disliked Season 4's slower pace generally felt that Season 5 was a big improvement.
- Season 9 has been praised by fans and critics after the extremely divisive Seasons 7 and 8. Main plus points include better pacing and dialogue, more compelling character motivation, and the promising introduction of the Whisperers.

Ham and Cheese:
- Jeffrey Dean Morgan's portrayal of Negan has achieved acclaim for maintaining the iconic character's over-the-top Joker-like characteristics and keeping even his most vile actions disturbingly entertaining. Many fans have stated that he's perfect as the character and Morgan is clearly having the time of his life.
- Steven Ogg as Simon is similarly over-the-top as well and it's pretty clear that he's having the time of his life playing a total bastard too.
- Xander Berkeley's performance as the smug, egotistical Gregory has also earned him a place among the Love to Hate crowd.
Harsher in Hindsight:
- During a dinner scene in the Season 1 finale, a drunk Daryl jokes to Glenn that he would love to see the latter's face turn red. Then comes the Season 7 premiere in which Glenn's head is brutally bashed to bits. What's worse is Daryl had a hand on it. And the title of the premiere, "The Day Will Come When You Won't Be", is taken from a quote from the Season 1 finale.
- In the final episode of Season 1, Dr. Jenner tells the group that French scientists held out the most while trying to find the solution to the walker outbreak. In the final episode of The Walking Dead: World Beyond, it's shown that not only are walkers in France even more dangerous than ones in America, but France might have very well been the ground zero for the walkers growing more agile, strong and intelligent, if not for the entire pandemic (if the graffiti on the ledge is to be believed).
- Several people come very close to dying but are nursed back to health in Hershel's farmhouse in Season 2. Then comes the revelation that everyone who dies without suffering brain trauma comes back as a walker and that Rick knew this all along but kept it from the others.
- When the group learns the CDC building is going to blow up with them inside, Carol wails that her daughter doesn't deserve to die that way and Jenner asks, "Isn't this better? To just hold your loved ones and let the clock run down?" Come Season 2, when Sophia has to be put down as a walker, one has to wonder if Carol ever regretted declining a painless millisecond with no possibility of resurrection.
- Also, the reveal that Jenner knew everyone was already infected puts his Despair Event Horizon in a whole new light.
- Jenner had offered to Mercy Kill the entire group, with his reasoning being that dying painlessly in the CDC building's explosion is better then the horrible ways they will inevitably die outside. Halfway through Season 8 and everyone Jenner made that offer to except Rick, Daryl, and Carol has ended up dying horribly throughout the show, just as Jenner predicted they would. Makes you think that perhaps he was right in the end.
- In Season 2, Carol tearfully begs God to spare her daughter and punish her instead. And Carol is indeed punished when she sees Sophia as a walker before Rick puts her down. This even carries into Season 4 when life becomes a constant punishing struggle and Carol becomes burdened by her killings of David, Karen, and Lizzie.
- On a related note, Hershel saying "A paranoid schizophrenic is dangerous, too. We don't shoot sick people," in "Secrets" becomes this after the events of "The Grove."
- After Glen Mazzara was fired after Season 3, fellow showrunner Kurt Sutter angrily predicted "they're going to plug somebody else in there ... my sense is that they won't even hire a showrunner ... They'll take some poor sap on the writing staff and elevate him ... And that poor sap will ultimately be just expediting the notes and vision of non-creative people. It'll work for a minute. In Season 4, when this will all happen, the numbers will be big, and people will show up. Will it continue to do well? No. My sense is that without somebody like Glen Mazzara running that show, eventually it will lose focus and the narratives will run out of steam, and it won’t be able to build off of itself, and it will suffer.” Whatever their opinions of Mazzara's tenure as showrunner, to many fans who have become disenchanted with Scott Gimple ("some poor sap on the writing staff" who got promoted and was initially successful but whose showrunning eventually led, in Seasons 7-8, to plummeting ratings and decreasing critical and fan approval) Sutter's words may seem prophetic.
- Sam's speech to Rick in Season 4 about being happy to meet living people becomes way harsher when he's killed by living people at Terminus since he probably went there seeking sanctuary and community.
- Rick tells Carl that he is not safe in "Strangers", during the arc that solidified Rick as a stone-cold, unrepentant badass who is more than willing to meet challenges head-on. Unfortunately, for the next two seasons he lets it go to his head and when the Saviors come knocking, he's completely overconfident and sure that they'll be easy to deal with. The Season 6 finale proves how completely wrong Rick is, and Negan even unknowingly quotes Rick when he tells him that his world is gone — "You are not safe".
- Daryl yelling that Beth is never going to see Maggie again in "Still" becomes this after he's proved right when Beth is killed during a hostage exchange gone wrong in "Coda".
- Also from "Still," we have Beth telling Daryl (and the viewers) that he sees her as nothing more than a dead girl since she's not like him, Maggie, Carol, or Michonne, even though she still managed to survive all this time. Come the Season 5 mid-season finale, she's dead, whereas Maggie, Carol, Michonne, and Daryl are all still alive.
- In addition to the above, Beth also says, "You're gonna miss me so bad when I'm gone, Daryl Dixon." Ouch.
- Beth sacrifices herself for Noah, only for him to die one of the most brutal deaths in the series before the end of the season, rendering her sacrifice almost totally useless.
- Sasha acknowledges an In-Universe example when she admits her guilt about coldly telling Noah he wouldn't make it in "Them" only for him to actually die a handful of episodes later in "Spend".
- Tara's statement of "I didn't see it" when comforting Rosita about why she doesn't think Abraham is dead becomes this when it's revealed that it's his head that got bashed in by Negan at the end of Season 6... and the audience didn't get to see it happen until months later.
- Of course, Carol's threatening speech toward Sam about how he would be eaten by walkers was already harsh, but it becomes even harsher when he not only dies exactly like she said he would, but it was her words in his head that ultimately made him completely freak out and cause not just his own death, but his mother and brother too.
- Abraham's humorous conversation with Glenn about "pouring the bisquick" and wishing to follow in his and Maggie's footsteps to start a family becomes this in the Season 7 premiere when both of them die, and Abraham goes first.
- "Twice as Far" features Denise on a quest to find Orange Crush for Tara. A few episodes later, Abraham gets his redheaded skull crushed.
- Glenn's dumpster "death" becomes a whole lot harder to watch after his actual death in Season 7 by Negan, which oddly enough happened almost exactly a year after. As a bonus, all of Glenn's near misses with death (well walker, flu, tank, brawl with Nicholas, etc.) make watching Negan beating Glenn to death with Lucille worse.
- "Service", featuring the Saviors forcing Alexandria as a whole into submission and humiliating them for their defeat during their first tribute, was the first episode to air after the surprise results of the 2016 presidential election. Several fans who were not happy about the election results compared the Alexandrians' reactions to the Saviors to their own feelings about the results.
- Spencer is present in Rick's vision of an impossible future where his group is enjoying Sunday dinner with a still living Glenn, Abraham, and Sasha pregnant with the latter's child, proving Rick really does love him as one of his family. A few episodes later, we learn that Spencer has lost faith in Rick and is plotting to usurp him. Tellingly, Rick is still distraught when Spencer is killed even after learning he tried to get Negan to kill him.
- Andrea dies in Season 3 by being bitten in the right side of her neck by a walker, and ending her own life with a bullet to the head. Four years later, her comic counterpart, who survived much longer than her, is bitten in the same manner in issue 165, dies and is put down by Rick (her Second Love) in issue 167.
- In the show's Robot Chicken special, Carl is depicted as the Sole Survivor of the zombie apocalypse, or at least the only survivor shown alive today, as an old man. In the mid-Season 8 finale, he reveals he was bitten by a walker and dies in the next episode, a huge deviation from the comics in which the character survived the book's entire run.
- On the above note, Chandler Riggs once tweeted a clickbait article about "Young Actors Who Quietly Passed Away This Year" that used a picture of him and even replied "i wish LOL". The first half of Season 8 actually does end with his character quietly passing away, so it seems that wish came true in a way.
- An example with an extremely quick turnaround would be the announcement at the 2018 New York Comic-Con that Scott Wilson had reprised his role as Hershel for the ninth season - only for news to break about an hour later the same night that Wilson had passed away from complications from leukemia. Even worse, his TV grandson Hershel Rhee (who his character did not live to see) debuted the following night on the Season 9 premiere.
- Rick seemingly dying in a heroic fashion by blowing up the bridge with the walkers before being secretly rescued by Anne is more painful to watch after his comic counterpart suffers an extremely anti-climactic death in the penultimate issue of the series.
- In "Ghosts", Aaron, trying to get under Negan's skin, tells him, "you failed your wife" and "she died hating you." Negan is clearly fuming but can only respond, "Careful." In "Here's Negan", we find out that Lucille committed suicide while Negan was away on a six-week scouting mission to find her chemotherapy bags to treat her cancer, and Negan refused to stay with her until she passed in favor of going on the trip, so the statement must have really hit home for him.
Heartwarming in Hindsight:
- Issue 160 is the first issue of the comics to be released after the Season 7 premiere which adapts Glenn's death for the small screen. In the issue, Dante fully confesses his feelings for Maggie, who refuses and says that she's only ever going to have room in her heart for Glenn, the love of her life. When Dante snaps that she's making herself unhappy for her dead husband, Maggie smiles softly and says she's happy when she thinks about him. Given the timing of the issue, one must wonder if Kirkman intended for the scene to be included in the first issue released after TV!Glenn's death.
- Henry is adopted by Carol. He is portrayed by Madison Lintz's (Sophia) brothers, Macsen and Matthew Lintz before and after Season 9's six-year Time Skip, respectively.
He's Just Hiding: It took about five minutes for fans to come up with ways Glenn might have survived what looked like certain death in "Thank You." The Talking Dead only reinforced this by conspicuously failing to mention the character in its "In Memoriam" segment despite eulogizing every other character who died. In "Heads Up," it's revealed the character really did survive and The Talking Dead had an "Unmemorium" to celebrate his return.
Hilarious in Hindsight:
- One of the first things Rick did during his Abandoned Hospital Awakening is looking at flowers. But it didn't become a meme until Season 4, albeit for different reason and by different characters.
- The last survivor of the CDC plays a major in the Season 1 finale. In May 2011, the real life CDC issued its own guidelines for a zombie outbreak. (Don't follow them, you'd die.)
- In the film Love Actually, Andrew Lincoln's character makes an Anguished Declaration of Love to his best friend's wife through cue cards and photos, ending with one that reads "My wasted heart will love you until you look like this..." followed by a picture of a zombie-like corpse. He actually keeps his promise.◊
- Dale half-jokingly scoffs early into Season 2 that everyone in the group would probably like the pleasure of shooting Daryl, who was the hot-tempered outsider of the group. By the next season, Daryl is The Lancer with Undying Loyalty to his companions and is regarded as a beloved, vital member of the group. In Season 4, the entire prison community loves him to the point he even feels awkwardly uncomfortable about it.
- During the shootout in "Triggerfinger", we get this gem of a line which takes on a whole new meaning in Season 6.
Hershel: He must have hit Glenn. He's behind the dumpster.
- In "Judge, Jury, Executioner," Dale tells Shane, "You're not going anywhere. And I'm not going anywhere," which is unintentionally hilarious when you realize they're both dead by the end of the next episode.
- The first three seasons are noted to share quite a few beats with the Toy Story films, but Season 3 is particularly notable in its' unintentional, but loose similarities. The main cast settles into a prison as their new home. The Big Bad is a ruthless dictator ruling under the persona of a kind, fatherly leader. His Dragon, whose actor's first name is Michael^explanation, pulls a Heel–Face Turn out of love (though Merle's is out of sibling love than Ken's romantic love). The blonde member of the heroes realizes she's romantically involved with the enemy. A potential sanctuary turns out to be a death trap (though only Andrea ever sees it as a potential home). At the climax of the season, The Governor's people turn on him when he proves how depraved and callous he really is.
- When they first meet, Michonne angrily snaps at Rick to not touch her. In Season 6, they start doing a whole lotta touching.
- The Governor, an antagonistic man who became the way he is because he lost his daughter to a Zombie Apocalypse, until he meets and befriends a little girl who softens his heart and whom he eventually sees as a surrogate daughter. Why does that sound familiar?
- Carol being Spared by the Adaptation, while Andrea and Dale both suffer Death by Adaptation becomes funny since the same thing happened to Melissa McBride's, Laurie Holden's, and Jeffrey DeMunn's respective characters in the Live-Action Adaptation of The Mist. ^note
- Beth and Zach dating becomes funny after Beth's actress, Emily Kinney, guest starred as a Villain of the Week on The Flash (2014) as Zach's actor, Kyle Gallner, previously played The Flash on Smallville.
- Tyreese dying because Chad L. Coleman will be a main character in the TV adaptation of The Expanse becomes funny because the main lead of that show will be played by Thomas Jane, Frank Darabont's original choice to play Rick Grimes and a fellow portrayer of The Punisher (in The Punisher (2004) and possibly Dirty Laundry) to TWD actors Norman Reedus (in Iron Man: Rise of Technovore) and Jon Bernthal (in Marvel Cinematic Universe).
- Due to Daryl's Badass Biker getup, many Marvel Cinematic Universe fans (and actors, specifically Gabriel Luna) have been wishing for Norman Reedus to portray the Johnny Blaze version of Ghost Rider in a possible future MCU film, which Reedus himself acknowledges that it would be fun to play the character. Cue Season 5, where Daryl kills no less than three walkers with a chain, which is known to be Ghost Rider's signature weapon in the comics.
- The comparisons between Morgan's stick fighting and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles became even funnier when Lennie James revealed his instructor was one of the stunt doubles for Donatello in the 90's films.
- The episode "No Way Out," which features the death of Rick's Love Interest, Jessie, along with Carl almost dying, just so happened to air on Valentine's Day.
- The episode "The Next World," provides a lot of Character Development for Michonne and ends with her realizing what she desired in her life. Two days later, she was given her own story arc in The Walking Dead videogame, which focuses on her character development and finding out what her place in life is.
- Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Lauren Cohan playing a married couple in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice due to Morgan's character killing the husband of Cohan's character in the source material and also the show. For the matter, their respective characters in that film were the parents of Batman.
- Michael Cudlitz has now gotten his butt handed to him by both DCEU Bat man and DCEU Thomas Wayne.
- Father Gabriel's arc in Season 6 sees him becoming a strong, capable survivor who actively fights alongside the others when the group is threatened. The episode in which he first professed a desire to become a fighter, "JSS", aired several months before comic issue #151 was released, which is where Comic Gabriel decided to become a proficient fighter. "JSS" also took place years before #151 did in the timeline. And just to be pedantic, #151 was released a few weeks before "No Way Out" depicted Gabriel becoming a certified badass. Comic Gabriel's first real combat mission sees him get killed in #158 thanks to a combination of his own cowardice and a knife from Beta, whereas TV Gabriel got the hang of combat from the get-go of his first mission. Sure enough, even when the show looks ready to adapt Gabriel's death, Gabriel still puts up a solid fight against his Whisperer assailants and wouldn't have gone out like a coward.
- An iconic line from Negan's already iconic introductory speech is "You are so gonna regret crossing me in a few minutes." A few minutes after that, the episode abruptly ends on the strongly criticized cliffhanger, forcing the audience to wait nearly seven months for us to actually see the resolution of the story.
- Khary Payton began playing the wise, staff-wielding Rafiki in The Lion Guard in 2015. A year later, he made his debut here as the wise, staff-wielding King Ezekiel. Payton said that in his audition, his character had the codename "Augustus", and those with the Leo astrology sign are usually born in August. Even further, "Augustus" had a pet lion instead of a tiger.
- Spencer having an interaction with Negan, a psychopath he knows absolutely nothing about, becomes this when his actor Austin Nichols was announced to play Sam Loomis in Bates Motel, who's best known for being a man interacting with a psychopath he knows absolutely nothing about. It gets funnier after Sam Loomis gets stabbed to death in the shower by Norman Bates in an episode that aired only a few months after Spencer gets stabbed to death in the street by Negan.
- For Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. fans, Piper killed Anton Ivanov in Season 9's "The Bridge".
- In Season 3's "Dead Weight", Tomas Calderon and Daniel Sousa are brothers. In the same episode, Richard Dragon, Lyla Michaels and Black Canary II were also in the same camp.
- "Too Far Gone" wouldn't be the last time that Kirk Acevedo would be involved in a post-apocalyptic conflict that involved most of humanity being wiped out by a virus, the Earth being overrun with a non-human force, and a battle sequence involving a tank breaching a barrier. The only difference between the two works being, a character named Caesar's would-be assasination wouldn't be as successful.
- In "The Obliged", Negan confesses to Michonne that he and his wife Lucille would have loved to had a child, but they never did. Jeffrey Dean Morgan's wife Hilarie Burton is set to play Lucille in "Here's Negan", and they have two children together.
- In Season 4, Zach guesses that Daryl used to be a cop before the apocalypse. Come Season 11, Daryl ends up as basically a cop for the Commonwealth, right down to the stereotype of eating donuts (which Rosita lampshades).
Ho Yay:
- Between Shane and Rick, especially in "Bloodletting" when Shane comforts Rick while gently cleaning his face with a washcloth and telling him to be strong.
- Milton and the Governor might be Heterosexual Life-Partners, but there's a good dash of Ho Yay, at least from Milt to the Gov.
- There's some interesting camera angles and up close shots of Negan as he looks at Rick, particularly in season 7, that comes across as this. There's also Negan grabbing Rick's face in the clearing, who's whimpering.

I Knew It!:
- Some fans suspected that Carol’s short hair was not out of a desire to keep walkers from grabbing her hair, but rather her abusive husband Ed. It’s confirmed in Season 9 that this was the case, as Carol becomes comfortable enough in her healthy marriage to Ezekiel to let it grow to its natural length.
- A lot of fans (especially those of the comics) knew from the get-go that the Anderson family would get wiped out, and that Carl would lose his eye in "No Way Out" from the commercials and the episode's title.
- Many fans had this reaction to Abraham being selected as Negan's Lucille victim in the Season 7 premiere, given that the character had received a lot of recent focus after spending quite some time Out of Focus. What the majority did not expect was Glenn, who was the one killed in the comics, also getting offed just minutes later as punishment for Daryl attacking Negan, believing that his controversial Near-Death Experience the previous season assured his safety.
- In "Swear" it is revealed that the Saviors massacred every male in the Oceanside community over the age of 10 for trying to rebel. Given Negan's philosophy that people must be kept around as a resource rather than slaughtered all at once it seemed oddly out of character for the Savior leader to have killed so many people at once without a good reason. Midway through Season 8, Simon reveals himself to be considerably more Ax-Crazy than previously thought, and a strong advocate for the complete extermination of all of Hilltop's residents, in addition to killing all but one of the Scavengers. Naturally, not very many were surprised to learn that Simon was the one responsible for the Oceanside massacre.
- Fans were slowly able to piece together that Carol released Negan to assassinate Alpha in Season 10, confirmed by “Walk With Us”.
- It was pretty much a given that Rick and Michonne would make a cameo in the series finale to set up their forthcoming spin-off.
Informed Wrongness: The show treats Eugene as being in the wrong for not realizing that Shira wasn't his radio contact sooner and takes Max's side as being justifiably mad at him for it. While it's understandable that Max might feel betrayed, she herself had two months to come forward and speak up after she saw Eugene with another girl impersonating her. Thus, she has no right to be angry if Eugene continues seeing someone else, since she made no overt effort to identify herself as "Stephanie", even with Hornsby and his spies on the prowl. Eugene also implies that he's autistic and has difficulty recognizing obvious social cues, in which case he's even less to blame in the situation.
It's the Same, So It Sucks: As time went on, the series faced increased criticism from viewers who tired of most episodes being set largely in the woods, due to the show filming in Georgia. Even when new locations such as Oceanside or the Commonwealth were introduced, or other plot points such as the Whisperer War came up, the characters always made their way back to the Georgia woods. The announcement that the spin-off shows Dead City and Daryl Dixon would be set in new locations away from the woods came as a relief to some viewers.

Jerks Are Worse Than Villains:
- Rick's wife, Lori, is by far the most hated character by fans in early seasons, because she makes bad decisions, is considered a negligent mother to Carl, sometimes argues with her husband Rick, and is the reason of the fights between Rick and his best friend Shane. Shane himself is the actual villain who is obsessed with Lori to the point of trying to rape her, has killed one of his allies, has a Lack of Empathy towards everyone, and eventually has also tried to kill Rick, his best friend. Fans go out of their way to justify all of Shane's actions and blame everything on Lori, including Shane's Sanity Slippage. It helps that Shane is the first character who Took a Level in Badass, while Lori is a Neutral Female, so it's much easier for most fans to hate on her.
- There exists a sizable number of fans who have forgiven Negan for murdering Abraham and Glenn, attempting to kill Carl, coercing women into marrying him, and ruling as a dictator, but still detest Father Gabriel for his Dirty Coward actions before his Heel–Face Turn, all of which — leaving his congregation to die, betraying Rick's group to Deanna, and neglecting to lock a gate — are relatively minor compared to the atrocities that Negan committed during his stint as Big Bad.

Launcher of a Thousand Ships: Daryl. Partly because he's one of the few characters who has yet to be canonically paired with anyone (until Season 10), leaving plenty of room for speculation.
Les Yay:
- Michonne and Andrea. It sometimes seems like what really bothers Michonne about the whole Woodbury situation is that Andrea pushed her aside in favor of a romantic relationship with the Governor.
- Tara and Rosita. When a sudden downpour saves the group from dehydration, the two of them lay down close to each other and bathe it in, giggling all the way. Tara also flirts with Rosita in "Start to Finish", calling her "gorgeous".
Like You Would Really Do It:
- In the Season 1 finale, you didn't really think that they were going to kill off Dale and Andrea so early, did you? Or the main character in the pilot, for that matter.
- Ever since averting this trope in "Pretty Much Dead Already", it's been clear that Anyone Can Die, and by "Thank You" an Ambiguous Situation was seen as surprising since the show's deaths are usually so straightforward. A lot of fans where so convinced of this after Glenn's apparent death in "Thank You" that by the time the show actually got around to The Reveal, the power of the Internet had made it much more The Unreveal.
- Because of the "If Daryl dies we riot" crowd, many viewers are fairly certain that the show will never actually kill Daryl off as long as he remains popular. When Daryl is bloodily shot at the end of "East", only 8% of the viewers voting on the following Talking Dead episode thought it would actually kill him. It doesn't help that after he shoots Daryl and the screen cuts to black, Dwight quickly quips "you'll be fine", as if assuring the audience he's fine... which doesn't jive well since the shooting was clearly meant to drum up suspense about Daryl's fate.
- Among the people in the Negan lineup, nobody really expected at least Rick or Carl to get the bat. AMC admitted as much when they released the cold open of the seventh season premiere confirming Rick wasn't the victim.
- After the Season 6 finale, it became a common joke that Season 7 would devote numerous episodes to everything but the resolution of the Season 6 cliffhanger. It got to the point that the show runners were forced to confirm the death would be shown in the season premiere and advertisements focused on almost nothing but the cliffhanger's resolution. The episode did wait until 20 minutes into the broadcast to actually show the death in full. That being said, the Season 7 premiere restored at least some fans' faith by killing off Abraham and Glenn in the span of three minutes. It got to a point where some fans were surprised when Carl didn't get his arm hacked off.
- Viewers quickly pointed to Never Found the Body as an indicator of Connie and Magna's survival after their Uncertain Doom at the end of "Squeeze". They were also conspicuously absent from the "In Memoriam" segment on the following episode of Talking Dead. By the end of the season, both characters were revealed to be alive.
- An unfortunate example occurred due to real-life events. A few weeks before the episode "A Certain Doom" aired, a spin-off focused on Daryl and Carol was announced to be in development. Thus when Carol was preparing to throw herself off the cliff to commit suicide and bring the horde down with her, not many fans (aside from a minority who have suggested the series announcement was misdirection) felt too concerned for Carol’s life. Even after McBride bowed out of the spin-off, it happened so late in the final season's production that few if any fans doubted she'd survive the events of the series.
  - Happened again when a Maggie/Negan spin-off called Dead City was announced before the conclusion of the final season's second part. This came as a surprise to cast and crew alike, with many voicing their displeasure.
- The penultimate episode of the series sees Judith shot by Pamela, but after the thermonuclear fan reaction to Carl's death, few really considered the possibility that Judith would also die, given how the show transparently had to age her up to take his place.
  - In the same episode, Jerry looks set to make a Heroic Sacrifice as he tells Aaron "see you on the other side" as he goes off to look for Elijah. But savvy viewers used reverse psychology and weren't surprised that the one character who braced himself for a potential death ended up surviving completely unharmed. Jerry's status as a massive fan-favorite who'd not gotten that much development also meant few people bought that the show would kill him.
Love to Hate:
- Shane, thanks to Jon Bernthal's complex performance and his Sanity Slippage making him a more interesting character than in the comics, who changes both Rick and the show forever.
- Merle, a hilarious badass brilliantly played by Michael Rooker. He was hated in Season 1 for being an arrogant and racist Jerkass, but he was Rescued from the Scrappy Heap in Season 3 and he even pulled a Heroic Sacrifice to give Daryl and the prison a fighting chance against the Governor.
- The Governor. Most viewers agree that the show's version of the villain felt like an actual person, and not an over-the-top manchild or a rapist slash baby killer like his comic counterpart, which is in no small part thanks to David Morrissey's nuanced performance.
- The cannibalistic Hunters are all pretty slimy pieces of work (Martin especially), but they gained some pity points when Season 5 showed a flashback of them being brutally subjugated by a bunch of Ax-Crazy Ungrateful Bastards.
- Negan, introduced at the end of Season 6, was voted more love to hate than "hate to love" in the accompanying Talking Dead episode by roughly a 4:1 ratio. Jeffrey Dean Morgan's fun and charismatic performance certainly helps.
- Gregory is a spineless, self-absorbed worm but he's also hilarious in how much of an asshole he is, which is compounded by how much everyone hates his guts. Xander Berkeley is clearly having a blast playing such an irredeemable coward, with many fans not minding that he was kept around if only so they could laugh at him.
- Simon. He's an unrepentant psycho, yes, but Steven Ogg is so clearly enjoying himself with the role that it's hard not to laugh with him.
- Alpha is a truly nasty piece of work but she's just so messed up and Samantha Morton gives such a creepy performance that she's always entertaining to watch.
- Beta is a remorseless killer and The Dragon of the Whisperers, but he's such a cool and imposing villain you can't help but enjoy whenever he's onscreen.
- Lance Hornsby is what you'd get if you mixed Saul Goodman with Littlefinger and dropped him in the middle of a Zombie Apocalypse. Josh Hamilton plays him with just the right balance of affable charm and smarmy relish, making his scenes both fun and unpredictable to watch.
- Much like Gregory, Sebastian Milton of all people has landed a spot here due to being such an obnoxiously over-the-top prick that he loops back around to hilarious instead. His arc in which he receives Adaptational Sympathy was also well-regarded for giving more depth to him and making it more satisfying to hate him when he has an Ignored Epiphany. His actor, Teo Rapp-Olsson, has also said that his interactions with fans has been positive and he's been praised for playing such an asshole so well.

Magnificent Bastard: “Vatos”: Guillermo is the leader of a nursing home group who stayed alongside many other family members and friends when the staff abandoned the place. Creating a system to fortify and gather supplies, Guillermo and his men play up a violent gang to scare off any raiders. After Glenn gets kidnapped, Guillermo threatens his life to gain control of the situation, attempting to get Rick Grimes and his friends to give up their supplies, escalating in a Mexican Standoff where he keeps his cool and a level head, standing his ground. When the cover is revealed, Guillermo shows to be a noble and polite person who simply wishes to protect the elderly people within the outbreak, and parts amicably with Rick and his group.
Memetic Badass:
- The "bulletdeer" from the Season 2 premiere, with fans jokingly suggesting the deer itself actually shot Carl.
- T-Dog, usually to humorously highlight that he's underutilized by the writers.
- Daryl, especially after his manly exploits in his first Character Focus episode in "Chupacabra".
- Hershel became this thanks to his "God Shotgun" in the Season 2 finale. Later when he was seen driving a car despite his amputated leg, several memes reported that Hershel had unlocked the cheat codes of the show. He even becomes an In-Universe example of this as Daryl playfully (but sincerely) insists he's a "tough sum'bitch."
- Carol after she single-handedly takes down Terminus and saves the group in the Season 5 premiere, which redeemed her for a large number of viewers who still had doubts after Season 4.
- Beth gains posthumous status. During Tyreese's hallucination, Imaginary!Beth is seen driving without looking at the road, which causes many fans to semi-jokingly state that Imaginary Beth is a better driver than Lori. (see Memetic Loser below)
- Hilariously, the dumpster that saved Glenn's life in "Heads Up" also gain this status in the eyes of many fans.
- Any background character who survives for a long time eventually evolves into this. Examples include Tobin pre-Season 8, Dianne, Scott, and Barbara.
- Jerry due to being a massive fan-favorite, with many hoping he becomes a king to succeed Ezekiel.
- Shiva became one because she's a tiger in the zombie apocalypse.
- Before growing up, many people joked that Judith would become one come season 32-ish.
Memetic Bystander: Jerry, Ezekiel's bodyguard who serves as an Adorkable comic relief instantly became a popular character in his few scenes.
Memetic Loser:
- Lori officially gains this status when she crashed a car after hitting a walker, mostly because she wasn't looking at the road if only briefly. And even before that, she's the source for the meme "better mom than Lori".
- Before they Took a Level in Badass, many Alexandrians were this. They were blissfully ignorant to the outside world, ill-prepared to face the walkers threat, and leaders of supply-run team ran or the construction crew tend to abandon their injured or surrounded teammates to be devoured by the walkers. It was bad enough that many fans at the time wished for Ricktatorship to return to shape them up.
- Owen, AKA the Alpha Wolf/ W man. He is allegedly a major villain for Season 6, but his walker traps end up killing nobody, he never personally kills a named character, every time he fights Morgan he gets his ass handed to him, his invasion of Alexandria only kills Redshirts, but causes all the Wolves to be killed in the end, fails to escape Alexandria in the end, gets infected by a zombie while failing to save Denise, is shot dead by Carol, fails to pull a genuine Heel–Face Turn, and gets killed by Morgan after becoming a walker (never killing anyone as a zombie either).
- Gregory has earned a place here as well thanks to him being a Dirty Coward who thinks highly of himself while begging like a pathetic dog to the Saviors. It also helps that he's not taken seriously by anyone, despite the fact that he claims to be more awesome than he actually is.
- Thanks to Carol being a Memetic Badass, pretty much anyone who threatens Carol becomes one of these in the eyes of the fandom.
- Through no fault of their own, horses as a species are known for always suffering horrible deaths on the show. They frequently get abandoned while survivors save themselves from walkers due to unfortunately being expendable. A horse that Rick rides in the pilot episode is swarmed by walkers in the streets of Atlanta and the show never looks back. It gets to the point that in Season 11 during a food shortage, a group of horses are rescued, only for one of them to promptly be slaughtered to provide food for the starving community.
- The Commonwealth troopers due to constantly falling victim to The Guards Must Be Crazy and their armor turning out to be extremely poor at protecting them. Averted with Pamela's special forces, however, who turn out to be genuine threats.
Memetic Molester: Dwight has earned this thanks to his bizarre obsession with Daryl. He stalked him, tortures him for entertainment, keeps him locked up in a dark room naked, watches everything he does, feeds him like a pet, wears his clothes, and takes everything that belongs to him so he can feel exactly like Daryl does. And then there's his perverted comments towards Rosita.
Memetic Mutation: So many they needed a separate page.
Memetic Psychopath: Carol. Her pragmatic kills in the series (to try and stop a virulent plague and a dangerously psychotic little girl) have mutated in the fandom to the idea that Carol's cure for the sniffles is murder, and whenever she gets angry, the target is cautioned not to look at the flowers lest Carol execute them.
Memetic Troll: Negan. He'll take you captive, beat your friends to death, give you a "Reason You Suck" Speech, and act like it's all just one big joke he pulled over on you laughing his ass off. Fans are already seeing him as a jokester who's only acting psychotic For the Evulz instead of actually being as dark as he really is.
Misaimed Fandom:
- After "Not Tomorrow Yet" a number of fans came to the Saviors' defense, claiming that because Rick's group attempted a preemptive strike against them and killed several of their members in their sleep, they were the victims in the conflict and Negan would be justified in whatever he does for revenge. This is despite the fact that the Saviors had already attacked Rick's group once when they attempted to rob Daryl, Sasha and Abraham. They were also coercing the Hilltop Colony into giving them most of their supplies under threat of death and had killed several of their members, taken a hostage and attempted to assassinate their leader. And this is their standard policy for every group they encounter. The episode itself even seems to try and make them as Obviously Evil as it can (every one with a speaking part is a Jerkass, their captive has been brutally beaten, one of them is shown to keep photos of grisly murders on the wall next to his bed, etc.) but no, since Rick shot first (but not really) none of that matters.
- Scott Gimple, Robert Kirkman and company have been citing this trope in response to the overwhelmingly negative reception to the Season 6 finale cliffhanger, with several comments to the tune of "It's your own fault you're upset because you went in expecting something you weren't supposed to". As evidenced in Broken Base and Never Live It Down, the fans haven't taken lightly to being told they shouldn't have expected pay-off to the season.
- Quite a few conservatives have taken the Saviors to be a condemnation of liberal economic policies, with memes about how Bernie Sanders/Hillary Clinton wants "half your shit" abounding during the 2016 US Presidential Election. However, this interpretation is not supported by the show itself. The Alexandria Safe-Zone, clearly portrayed as the good guys, has an economy based on rationing, which Deanna explicitly compares to communism at one point. While the Saviors do exact tribute, which Spencer compares to paying taxes, this only applies to subjugated vassals, not their own outposts. In fact, the Saviors are the only group so far to have anything resembling capitalism, and their point-earning system is shown to be extremely exploitative and unequal.
Moe:
- Judith. She's a Little Miss Badass who's inherited her brother's idealism, her mother's ability with a sword, and her father's gun skills.
- Princess, with her cheerful attitude, colorful wardrobe, and Adorkable behavior. It also helps that she's a Sad Clown with a Dark and Troubled Past extending before the apocalypse.
Most Wonderful Sound:
- Beth's singing.
- Judith's first cry can be considered one.
- "Space Junk", the song from the end of the pilot, makes a welcome return as Rick is airlifted to safety shortly after being revealed to be alive at the end of "What Comes After".
- Hearing the voice of Rick Grimes one last time at the end of the finale of the series we started with him.

Narm: Has its own page
Narm Charm:
- A huge part of the show consists of a lot of extras and actors stumbling around belting out obnoxiously loud groans aimlessly reaching out to any humans and living things they see with actors having to (in the early seasons) scream in terror at them. And in some episodes, there are dozens if not hundreds of them. It sounds absolutely ridiculous, but the makeup effects and the extras themselves are so good that not a single scene involving zombies is Narmy because of the zombies themselves. The scenes with hordes of them never cease to be nightmarish in appearance.
- The infinite ammo of Hershel's "God Shotgun" is quite blatant and silly, but it's such a strong character moment that it cemented him as Memetic Badass nonetheless.
- Abraham's frequent F-bombs from the comics are usually Bowdlerized by substituting the word "dick," creating gems like "Plan just got dicked," and "Mother dick," but it somehow works thanks in part to Michael Cudlitz's Deadpan Snarker delivery.
- Bob's "Tainted Meat!" rant is ridiculous, but still manages to be an awesome Shut Up, Hannibal!.
- Daryl saving Sasha and Abraham from the Saviors via blowing them up with an RPG in the mid-season premiere of Season 6. It reads like pretty straightforward badassery on paper, but the scene comes off so ridiculously that it drifts into Narm Charm territory. First off, the whole concept of a biker gang being blown to bits by an RPG is over-the-top and video-gamey to the point you'd expect to see it in Saints Row. Second, the troupe's leader does the "oh no I won't kill you, except maybe I WILL... but nah I'm just kidding... except MAYBE I'M NOT" bit while threatening them like a dastardly cartoon villain. Lastly, presumably in an attempt to surprise the audience, you don't actually see Daryl's missile fly past the camera or anything so it looks like they just spontaneously explode on the spot, which, some might say, is positively hilarious.
- Many of Carl's big moments with Negan get adapted for the small screen, but something gets lost in translation since a major part of why the moments were impressive in the comic was that Carl was still a very young boy. Nonetheless, he earned the genuine respect of Negan due to refusing to submit to him and openly threatening him without fear. Carl in the show, however, ends up a teenager due to several years passing in real-life and Chandler Riggs obviously no longer being a young child, despite only two years tops having passed. Ultimately while it's not quite as impressive as a young child mouthing off to Negan and threatening to kill him, the scenes were still well-received, especially since in the show in particular, Negan grows to like Carl so much that when Carl suffers a Death by Adaptation, Negan genuinely mourns his death.
- Pretty much everything about King Ezekiel and the Kingdom is made to be cheesy and over the top on purpose so as to bring comic relief to shake off a lot of the bleakness that's been on the show.
- Everything about the Kingdom is expanded with the Scavengers, who have all given themselves ridiculous names, dress like ninjas, talk in a horribly pretentious way, and live in a giant garbage dump. And then they make Rick fight a spike-covered zombie in a pit like the opening scene of Army of Darkness. The whole thing is so insanely over the top nuts that it's pretty much impossible to think we're intended to take it seriously.
- The Kingdom finally puts on its' first movie in years at the Fair, and it's an old cartoon you'd probably find in the movie section at a dollar store. The audience is still laughing it up and enjoying it. While it's kinda silly to see the audience so raucously enjoying the cheap cartoon as opposed to a real feature film, that's the point - they're supposed to be enjoying it, because it's their first movie in years. The stars in Judith's eyes alone as she experiences what must be her first movie in a theater alone make it worth it. Word of God later stated that they did have an actual movie to put on, but the cartoon was all that the show could actually get the rights to showing in the episode.
- For Founder's Day, the Commonwealth puts on a pro-wrestling tournament that is completely bonkers, over-the-top, and one of the zaniest scenes ever put to the small screen for the show. But it's still a complete blast to watch and makes for a fun way to let both the cast and the audience's guard down in preparation for the chaos about to unfold.
Nausea Fuel: It's a show about zombies. Of course, this is going to pop up from time to time.
- When the group hacks apart a zombie to disguise themselves with its guts in the titular scene of "Guts," everyone reacts appropriately, and Glenn outright vomits when T-Dog pushes him over the edge by talking about dead puppies and kittens.
- In "What Lies Ahead", Rick and Daryl cut open a dead zombie's stomach to see what it's been eating.
- All zombies are pretty nauseating, but special notice must go to the zombie the group finds in a well on Hershel's farm: after sitting in the well for who knows how long, it has become extremely bloated. When they manage to pull it out of the well it rips in half, with a huge torrent of liquid organs pouring out as well as what very well might possibly be a whole lot of maggots.
- And then the zombie trying to get at Lori when she's trapped in an overturned car. It starts pushing its head through a hole in the windshield, peeling all of the skin and flesh off its face in the process so all Lori sees on the other side is a set of bloody, exposed jaws clamping at her.
- In the Season 3 premiere, as the gang starts taking over the prison, some walkers are wearing riot helmets. Rick takes one off, and its face rips off!!
- Another prisoner-walker that's in handcuffs struggles to free its arms, and does so by pulling so hard it flays the flesh off its hand.
- In "Hounded", Michonne accidentally slices a walker's stomach open, causing its intestines to ooze out all over her body.
- When the Crack Head walker starts to crawl towards Bob in the Season 4 premiere, he fends it off by grabbing a chunk of its head and slowly opening the wound, exposing the inside of its skull.
- The flooded food bank walkers in Season 5 are even worse than the well walker from Season 2 since they've presumably been festering down there for much longer, and the water is best described as soupy.
- The cannibals of Terminus, full stop. "Strangers" ends with a delightful scene in which Gareth and his companions noisily gorge themselves on Bob Stookey's leg right in front of him and laugh about it. Gareth even savors his food, and mocks Bob and tells him he tastes delicious. In the opening of the following episode, "Four Walls and a Roof", we get a brief montage of the Hunters messily chewing and slurping down Bob's leg intercut with clips of a nearby group of walkers, showing just how similar they are to the undead. In "No Sanctuary", we also see a supply room where they keep the supplies they scavenge off the people they catch and eat, and there's a huge pile of toys. There's also the horrific comment Gareth makes about keeping and eating baby Judith.
- "Coda" treats us to zombies with their skin burned off and a fairly realistic look at what even low-speed vehicle collisions can do, including the fact that Lamson's hands have been partially flayed by the zip-ties he's wearing.
- "Spend" features two of the most horrific, if not the most horrific deaths of the series. First up, Aiden Monroe is pinned to a wall when he's impaled on shrapnel following the explosion of a grenade. He forces Glenn and company to leave him behind, and thus he gets the dubious honor of watching in pure agony as a horde of walkers swarms him, and begin ravenously tearing out his innards and devouring them, all while he's still alive. Then later, poor Noah is dragged away from Glenn by another horde, and he's then slammed against the glass of a revolving door, and then torn to pieces from behind, his body becoming a bloody smear on the glass and the walkers even tear his jaw open, and he just keeps screaming.
- As if the sight of poor Sam being chomped by a horde of walkers and one walker being shown with chunks of his flesh in its' teeth as if it were grated cheese, while his mother is Forced to Watch, "No Way Out" shows a fully detailed shot of Carl's face after Ron inadvertently shot him in the eye.
- "Not Tomorrow Yet" gives us a wall of images showing people with their faces violently caved in, which comic fans will instantly recognize as Negan's handiwork. Similarly, the wet crunching sounds of Negan's bat caving in somebody's skull in the finale are rather nausea-inducing.
- The Season 7 premiere shows Negan clubbing Abraham and Glenn's heads in. Complete with multiple shots of their mutilated skulls. Glenn's head, in particular, was nothing but mush in the dirt.
- Spencer getting Gutted Like a Fish by Negan entirely onscreen, with his intestines gushing out and a literal river of blood flooding the street.
- Season 8 sees Morgan murder a Savior by ripping into his stomach via a hole from a gunshot wound, and ripping out his intestines.
- Late season 8 has a quite literal example when Eugene, needing to escape his captors and having no weapons on hand, force himself to throw up on Rosita to distract her and give himself a chance to run. It’s so vile and crass that even Eugene himself realized how low he had sank and agreed he deserved some comeuppance for the act.
- In "What's Been Lost", we see the aftermath of Lance being forced to cut up and feed his agent Roman Calhoun's corpse to the undead Sebastian, and it may not be hyperbole to say it's the bloodiest scene of the series. Chunks of flesh are splattered around and there's gallons upon gallons of blood everywhere. Lance follows up by smashing Sebastian's skull in Negan-style and even leaves his lucky coin there as a calling card for Pamela - who reaches into her son's brains to get it.
Never Live It Down:
- The circumstances of Frank Darabont's firing from Season 2 and the perceived consequential drop in quality cast a haunting shadow over the show's success and AMC as a whole, with some refusing to watch the show or even the network as a result.
- Rick claims he's "doing stuff... things" about twice in the entire series, but it's still among the most popular memes in the fandom.
- Long after he Took a Level in Badass, Carl is still remembered as the dumb kid who couldn't stay in the house and indirectly got Dale killed in Season 2. It gets lampshaded in Season 6 in which Michonne is upset at him for leaving home on his own (Carl by this point being a competent survivor).
- In the Season 6 premiere, Nicholas was shown putting in a genuine effort to redeem himself by killing walkers alongside Glenn and actually listening to him. Nevertheless, in the subsequent The Talking Dead poll asking if Nicholas had redeemed himself 70% of people still said no.
- The Glenn/dumpster fiasco and how many episodes it took to resolve is unlikely to be forgotten by fans any time soon. It's notorious enough that when the last episode of Season 6 ended without Negan's victim being shown, fans started cracking jokes about how Season 7 would start out with multiple episodes about everything except the conclusion of the last scene. As well as how even if the victim is Glenn like it is in the comics, he'll be saved at the last second by Nicholas' body falling in front of him and crawling under a dumpster. Additionally, it's become a joke regarding any death in the series that if the viewer looks closely enough they'll see that "Nicholas was the one who died instead of ___."
- The show received intense negative critical and fan backlash to the extremely controversial cliffhanger used at the end of Season 6 (to the point where it barely qualifies as Broken Base above since almost nobody cared for it). Given how pretty much every interview with the cast and crew since the episode's airing involved the cliffhanger somehow, this move widely regarded as a major misstep will never be forgotten. What has truly not done the show any favors was Word of God's explanation for why they decided to do this (and the other questionable cliffhangers earlier in the season) on the episode of Talking Dead following the season finale, which bordered on Viewers Are Morons, as it (they write in a shocking moment and the show then focuses on all of the surviving characters' reactions to it) pretty much boiled down to explaining the basic concept of a Wham Episode, if not simple plot progression, and does nothing to actually explain it. In hindsight, it should be noted that the Season 7 premiere was ultimately the point of no return for the show's ratings, as they steadily declined for the remainder of the show's run.
- Gabriel will always be remembered as the guy who forgot to lock a gate not once, but twice, allowing a walker to get inside Alexandria and Negan to escape his cell. Though the series finale does give him an awesome moment of redemption where he is the one to unlock a gate and save hundreds of lives before they are Devoured by the Horde rampaging through the Commonwealth.
- Some people still blame Daryl for his actions in "The Day Will Come When You Won't Be" that led to Glenn’s death, even after Maggie herself admitted she didn't fault him for what happened.
- Negan's actions as Big Bad from Seasons 6-8 understandably have not been forgotten by some of the fandom and most of the characters even though he's genuinely pulled a Heel–Face Turn as of Season 9.
No Such Thing as Bad Publicity: This is the stance of show runners like Scott Gimple and Robert Kirkman regarding the extremely negative reception to the sixth season finale's cliffhanger. The two consistently defended it, as they claim the aim of the cliffhanger was to get people talking about the show. Kirkman even referred to the post-cliffhanger chaos, speculation and backlash as "fun". The two indicated a nonchalance about the negative reception and only passively made any effort to apologize to the majority of fans and critics angry with the decision. It didn't go very well for the show, however, as ratings plummeted in the subsequent seasons and never recovered.

Older Than They Think: After the extremely negative reception to the Season 6 cliffhanger, Robert Kirkman has pointed out that every issue of the comics ends on a cliffhanger to drum up suspense and excitement for the next installment. However, as evidenced by the rest of this page, this defense has largely been deemed unsatisfactory as the Negan cliffhanger came in the middle of a hotly anticipated moment that was hotly anticipated because of the source material doing it in one brutal issue, and did not have a months long cliffhanger abruptly ending the story in the middle of the climactic scene.
One-Scene Wonder:
- Some particularly memorable zombies manage to stand out from the horde, and some have even become iconic. The bicycle walker from "Days Gone Bye" (who got her own webisodes) and the well walker from "Cherokee Rose" (the only zombie that's ever been credited on the show) are probably the most prominent examples. Other famous walkers include the charcoal-black walkers from "The Grove" and the walker killed by a flare-gun in "The Distance".
- Dave and Tony manage to make an impression in the Season 2 mid-premiere despite being killed off quickly at the end of their introduction episode, due to Dave's charisma and affable personality and how they and their group in general introduce the theme of other survivors being even more of a threat then the walkers, a concept that has stayed in the series long past their deaths.
- Jon Bernthal's posthumous cameo as Shane in "Made to Suffer" leaves quite an impression.
- The insane, bearded Terminus prisoner who appears for all of five seconds in "No Sanctuary" before getting eaten is quite memorable. He does get one additional scene set before he lost his mind, in which he’s so creepy and menacing that many fans wondered if he was an Adaptational Early Appearance of Negan himself.
- Out of all the deceased characters who return for "What Happened And What's Going On", the Governor was the star attraction due to how genuinely unsettling it was for such a feared character to make a return from beyond the grave. Due to being portrayed as the dying Tyreese’s equivalent of the devil, the character gets to really play up his evil in a way he never could while alive, making him more frightening than ever.
- Some of the Wolves in "JSS," such as the bearded axe-wielding one, many of whom have unique and interesting appearances but no more than a minute of screen time before they are killed.
- Bud, the Savior Mook Lieutenant who is the first to utter the name "Negan," was on screen for about five minutes before Daryl blew him to bits, but he chewed the scenery with every line that came out his mouth — as well as having the honor of being the first Savior to truly pose a threat to the group.
- Gunther, the sociopathic Savior who captures Ezekiel only appears in "Some Guy" and is best remembered for overall creepiness, resemblance to both Thomas Richards from the comics and Jeffrey Dahmer, his threat to put Ezekiel's head on a pike like in the comics as well, and his death at the hands of Jerry.
- The deceased Shane and Hershel re-appear to a badly wounded Rick in "What Comes After" and their scenes carry huge emotional weight, particularly Hershel's, given his actor's death some weeks before the episode aired. ^note
- Hilltop rider Roy made an impression in Season 9 due to being a cameo of the well-known C. Thomas Howell. He later returns for two episodes in Season 11, getting little more screentime before being killed off.
- Michonne's Mushroom Samba-induced visions of an alternate timeline where she joined the Saviors lets us see stock footage of long-deceased or departed characters like Rick, Glenn, Abraham, Simon, and Carl, making for a very memorable send-off for Michonne before she was Put on a Bus. Carl's brief cameo was particularly poignant since in this timeline, he was giving the woman who became his beloved adopted mother a Death Glare he reserved for Negan in the prime timeline.
- Wells the Reaper only has one scene of note when he singlehandedly goes to lure a horde away from Meridian. His Large Ham antics, and the fact that he does a pretty good job of it, plus suffering a death all too similar to Jesus's death two seasons earlier, make him pretty memorable for his brief screentime.
- The complex leader Ian is only around for one scene, but he makes quite the impression due to being a well-acted special guest appearance by Michael Biehn.
Overshadowed by Controversy:
- Despite killing off several Scrappies (Nicholas, Sam, Ron), bringing in several popular comic characters (Heath, Jesus, Dwight, Negan), adding fan-favorite Morgan Jones to the main cast, turning Richonne canon and adding comic relief to balance out the darkness, Season 6 will likely always be remembered for its missteps with the frustrating and near universally-reviled cliffhangers and copouts. Glenn's fakeout "death" and Negan killing... someone (along with the more minor cases of the anticlimactic ending of "Start to Finish" and Dwight shooting Daryl offscreen in "East") have been talked about by fans and critics a great deal more than anything else, to the point that a non-viewer could very easily get the false impression that Season 6 in general was terrible and poorly-received.
- Season 8 is almost universally known for the controversial Death by Adaptation of Carl that received so much backlash that showrunner Scott Gimple was Kicked Upstairs and replaced with Angela Kang.
- Downplayed with the final two episodes of Season 10, “The Tower” and “A Certain Doom”. While they are both fairly well-regarded, they will likely most be remembered due to the delays caused by the COVID-19 pandemic in which the latter had to be pushed back due to the lockdown halting post-production, forcing the former to become the pseudo-season finale for several months. Many reviewers had to check their expectations for the former since it wasn’t supposed to be the season finale, while for the latter, reviewers had to try to avoid the trap of deciding whether or not it was worth the unplanned wait.
- The shadow of the pandemic also lingered over the extended run of Season 10 since they were produced during the peak before vaccines became available for the world. Once again, reviewers had to check their expectations since the episodes were openly announced as being smaller stories that could be told while obeying COVID-19 protocols such as a minimalist cast and being unable to move the Commonwealth arc forward due to that arc revolving around a massive community.^note. This also applied to the first eight episodes of Season 11, which while produced after vaccines had become available, were still produced during the pandemic, and still have some visible limitations since the Commonwealth still doesn’t have many people in it and the Reaper arc primarily takes place in desolate countryside.

Padding:
- "No Way Out" wastes much of the first half of its' runtime on filler material. There is a notable Cliffhanger Copout ignoring the cliffhanger ending of the previous episode, and Enid stops Glenn so he can explain again what he literally told her the episode before. This was clearly done to save the main chaotic death scene for the middle of the episode.
- "Diverged" is the only episode of Season 10's extended run to do absolutely nothing for the plot and only depicts Daryl and Carol moping and doing mundane tasks. You could easily cut the episode and lose nothing of value, besides Jerry's heartwarming hug for Carol (which most critics admitted was the sole saving grace of the episode).
Paranoia Fuel:
- The tagline for the first few episodes of Season 5 is "Hunt or be hunted", in which the group contends with a group of cannibals bent on eating them. We get several scenes where the group notices a noise in the woods, but think that it was nothing. Daryl later notes to Rick that he feels like they were being watched. In "Strangers", Carol hears a Hunter coming which thankfully drives them off, but it's no less frightening to imagine Carol in Bob's place at the end of the episode. Finally, after Bob is captured and gets his leg eaten, we get a scene where Sasha is looking in the quiet darkness of the woods, and you expect a Hunter to pop out at any moment...
- The episode "Not Tomorrow Yet" features this in abundance. Without going into too many spoilers, the episode basically has a home invasion involving the systematic murdering of people in their sleep or when they least suspect death. Try going to bed the next time without imagining Rick Grimes preparing to plunge a knife into your skull the second your eyes are closed.
- Once we learn that the Saviors are Not Quite Dead after the attack on the satellite outpost, and they keep returning in larger and larger numbers, the last episodes of Season 6 are an uneasy calm before the storm as we feel like Negan is out there waiting for us right now.
- Alpha being at the fair, interacting with community members. You're just waiting for the other shoe to drop, and she's in disguise, so nobody who's actually seen her even recognizes who she is.
  - Arguably even worse when it's revealed that Dante is a Whisperer spy stationed at Alexandria who not only was tampering with their water (leaving many residents sick and one ultimately dying) but also was at the barn massacre forcing Siddiq to watch his friends get murdered by Alpha and then murders Siddiq himself.
- The Reapers make an intimidating introduction in Season 10’s “Home Sweet Home”, with just one scout being a One-Man Army with clear military background and weaponry at his command. Just one of them gives the group a lot of trouble - and leading up to their introduction, it’s clear there are even more of them out there, and they are dead set on killing Maggie and her friends. Their hunting the group in the first three episodes of Season 11 also prove they’re just as dangerous as we feared, using silence and scary masks as intimidation tactics and just keep pursuing the group.

Questionable Casting: While most of the cast match their comics counterpart extremely well. Fans of Comics Siddiq are very disappointed that TV Siddiq barely resembles his comics counterpart outside of skin tone and being bearded. Comics Siddiq is an Arab American Muslim construction worker who is the resident Big Guy due to being a mountain of muscle. TV Siddiq is portrayed by Indian American non-Muslim Avi Nash who is average height and slim. What makes his portrayal more eye rolling is thay he is portrayed as a generic Brown Asian/Muslim Doctor guy with mediocore combat ability (somewhat a tired trope for Brown Asian men in fiction). Some fan even noted that Avi Nash is a better fit for Sheriff Kapoor who never appears in the TV show.

Replacement Scrappy: Henry takes over most of Carl's canonical Story Arc following the latter's Death by Adaptation midway through Season 8. Henry never caught on with the fans since he has a strong tendency to cling to the Idiot Ball.
Rescued from the Scrappy Heap:
- Hershel wasn't quite The Scrappy in early Season 2, but his Ungrateful Bastard tendencies, disapproval of Glenn's relationship with Maggie (and referring to Glenn as "the Asian boy"), and being Genre Blind about the walkers didn't exactly make him a universally beloved character, either. After "Pretty Much Dead Already", however, he realizes the true state of things, develops Undying Loyalty to Rick, befriends Glenn, and ultimately mellows out to become the Team Dad of the group and one of the most beloved characters of the entire series.
- Carl. After spending most of Season 2 loathed for his total inability to stay in the house and inadvertently getting Dale killed, he becomes a fully qualified and capable badass on par with the rest of the group in Season 3.
- Michonne's sullen personality, permanent scowl, and refusal to explain her mistrust of the Governor to Andrea early in Season 3 did not make a good impression on fans, but she eventually won most of them back by showing a more human side in "Clear" and "This Sorrowful Life".
- Carol's passivity and crying (though understandable for an abuse victim and grieving mother) didn't earn her many fans in the first two seasons. Then she improved exponentially by forging meaningful relationships and a strong role within the group throughout Seasons 3 and 4, eventually emerging as a Memetic Badass and fan favorite in the Season 5 premiere.
- While entertaining and memorable, Merle's one-dimensional bigotry wasn't exactly the greatest characterization in Season 1. However, Season 3 turned that around by giving him a central role, downplaying his bigotry, and emphasizing his connection with Daryl to make him far more compelling than his Establishing Character Moment.
- After more than a season as a Dirty Coward and lying about being a scientist, Eugene finally Took a Level in Badass in "Spend", killing some walkers on his own while carrying a wounded Tara and pulling a Big Damn Heroes for his other friends, finally realizing that constantly running away and leaving his friends to die is wrong. Taking part in the battle of Alexandria in "No Way Out" redeems him for those who still had their doubts. Unfortunately, he went right back into the heap after betraying the group and joining the Saviors. Fortunately, he managed to pull a Heel–Face Turn and slowly started to rise from it again in Season 9.
- Father Gabriel is a great example, starting off as a Dirty Coward who left his congregation to be eaten alive by walkers. He's also very distrusting of Rick's group, and even after they spend weeks defending him from the undead, he has the audacity to betray the group to Deanna, tries to get them kicked out of Alexandria, and deliberately taunts a grieving Sasha. After an intervention with Maggie, he begins learning how to fight, starts holding mass in the town's church, helps Rick and the others take down a horde of walkers, and has his very own moment of awesome when he shoots a Savior in cold blood, whilst reciting a passage from the Bible. His Badass Preacher status not only won over the fans, it won over Rick, who is more than happy to let Gabriel babysit his infant daughter. He eventually becomes one of the show’s main characters and a massive fan-favorite.
- Morgan was an extremely divisive character in Season 6 due to his turn to pacifism and the show once again exploring a survivor trying to avoid killing humans at all costs. Season 7 completely undoes it, and makes Morgan into a much stronger and likable character (albeit at the cost of some of his sanity) who finally accepts that the Saviors must die. He became a Base-Breaking Character again after joining the main cast of Fear the Walking Dead.
- Eugene had a severe amount of hate thrown at him for his Face–Heel Turn in Seasons 7 and 8, primarily the latter, which he made out of cowardice. After he redeems himself by helping defeat Negan, from Season 9 onward he is able to rise from the heap as he finally leaves his cowardice behind and proves he is a major asset to the communities. His arc in Seasons 10 and 11, primarily revolving around his quest to finally find love with Stephanie, has been well-received thanks to his genuine chemistry with her and his actor’s performance.
- Dwight is another good example. After being loathed by the fandom in Season 6 and much of Season 7 for betraying, shooting, and torturing Daryl, killing Denise, and being an unrepentant Yes-Man to Negan, he rises from the heap in Season 8 by joining Rick's coalition against the Saviors, being completely onboard with all of his plans, and later expressing remorse and apologizing for everything he did while also helping the remaining survivors of the war reach Hilltop.
- Somewhat ironically, Jadis watching her people get slaughtered was the best thing that could have happened to the character in the eyes of the viewers: she stopped speaking in her bizarre fashion, she started wearing normal clothes, and she even begins to make consequential moves, up to and including taking Negan prisoner. Finally, in Season 9, she rescues a badly injured Rick from the river and takes him to safety. Considering most people expected Rick to be Killed Off for Real due to Andrew Lincoln's departure from the show, the fact that she made sure Rick Grimes lived to see another day despite him being Put on a Bus completely rescued her from the heap.
- Tammy Rose was initially disliked by several fans due to her character being a mouthpiece for the writers to spell out Maggie’s character arc, and later Tara’s, with Brett Butler having little nuanced dialogue to work with. Fans warmed up to her, however, when she showed her warmer, more protective side when she and Earl adopted the Whisperer baby, and by a flashback revealing she fought tooth and nail alongside the other pike massacre victims to try to protect Rodney.
- Negan was a Base-Breaking Character for a long time since his introduction, but his character arc in Season 10 which showed him having genuine friendships with Judith, Father Gabriel, and Lydia along with killing Alpha and helping the Coalition kill Beta gained him a considerable number of fans. His Day in the Limelight "Here's Negan" seems to have pulled out of base-breaking status entirely. Come Season 11, Instagram fanpages for the series have been have held polls on the Negan vs. Maggie conflict...and most of these polls leaned towards Negan.
- Much like her novel counterpart, Princess was extremely divisive after her introduction. While Paola Lázaro's performance was praised for highlighting the character's vulnerability and making her less obnoxious than in the comic, fans were still divided on whether her Cloudcuckoolander personality had a place on this show and whether she served any purpose other than taking away screen time from an already enormous cast. Her Day in the Limelight episode was also controversial among those who didn't think she deserved one so soon after he debut and wish it had been centered around the Commonwealth or even Eugene, who spearheaded the journey to find the new community, instead. Reception improved vastly in Season 11 when she was given additional Hidden Depths, her tendency to hallucinate (a reviled character trope on this show) was done away with entirely, and she mellowed out to become a more level-headed yet still delightfully quirky character who starts a sweet romance with General Mercer.
Retroactive Recognition:
- Madison Lintz a.k.a. Carol's daughter Sophia is better known these days as Maddie Bosch in Bosch and Bosch: Legacy.
- Future Oscar nominee Kerry Condon plays Clara in the Season 4 premiere.
- Robin Lord Taylor, now best known as Oswald Cobblepot from Gotham, appears in Seasons 4 and 5 as Sam, one-half of a friendly couple Rick and Carol encounter who ends up with his throat slit by the residents of Terminus.
- Before she was Black Canary on Arrow, Juliana Harkavy played Alisha, Tara's first girlfriend and a member of Martinez's camp.
Romantic Plot Tumor: Many feel this way about the Daryl and Leah pairing, given that it originated over the span of one episode (albeit one that takes place over the course of several years) and continues into Season 11 in an arc accused of being Trapped by Mountain Lions when most fans would rather the story move on to explore the Commonwealth. It doesn't help that the vast majority of people prefer Daryl either single or with Carol or Connie.
Ron the Death Eater: As of Season 10, both Maggie and Negan have become this depending on what side of the argument you fall on.
- For Negan, fans can go a bit too far on how irredeemable they see him, as even when he was a villain he had redeeming qualities and moments and is a lighter shade of black than more psychotic and ruthless characters like the Governor or Alpha. There's also the fact he has worked hard for redemption. In "Here's Negan", a vocal minority dismiss him as being a asshole before the apocalypse anyways so he doesn't deserve any sympathy, forgetting the legitimate guilt he had for being one, showing himself to be clearly a good or at least decent man trying to better himself before being broken by Lucille's death.
- For Maggie, some have gone as far as to condemn her for not forgiving Negan. This ignoring that she wasn't present to witness his redemption (a fact which she herself acknowledges) meaning to her he is still the brutal killer who executed her husband and doesn't deserve her forgiveness. Not to mention, redemption or no, it doesn't change that he still violently murdered her husband and forced her to watch it, giving her legitimate reason to personally hate Negan.

Sacred Cow:
- Glenn Rhee is easily one of the show's most beloved characters among fans and critics alike. His death fakeout in Season 6 was one of the most hotly discussed TV moments of the year, and his actual death in the Season 7 premiere that adapted his similarly iconic comic death quickly became a defining moment of the show. His death is known for being the point when many detractors tuned out of the show as evidenced by how the ratings declined for the remainder of its' lifespan.
- Hershel Greene following his Character Development into the beloved Team Dad of the group. His death is regarded as one of the most tragic moments of the series, and the passing of Scott Wilson in 2018 - right after he reprised his role as Hershel one last time - has only made him more beloved.
- Dog and Shiva for being beloved Team Pets, and the latter for bravely sacrificing her life for her owner.
- Jerry is generally regarded as one of the most wholesome, lovable characters of the series and it's not uncommon for even the show's critics to admit to still loving him.
Salvaged Story:
- The show excises a lot of the Rape as Backstory used for quite a large amount of the comic's female cast. Most notably, Michonne isn't the victim of repeated rape by The Governor, and Alpha does not allow the Whisperers to rape their women in an effort to keep her people happy (though this was adapted for the Grady arc). Most fans have come to look at the comic's use of it with a more critical eye and are grateful the show has done away with most of it due to deeming it to be poor taste.
- Lori acknowledges in the Season 3 episode "Sick" that she hasn't been a good wife and her parenting skills won't be winning any Mother-Of-The-Year awards.
- Robert Kirkman himself sees the show itself as one in some ways since he was excited to do more with Shane after originally rushing to kill him off in case the comics were short-lived and has stated (on The Talking Dead following "Too Far Gone") that he now considers the Governor's original intentionally unsatisfying death a mistake he wished to avoid in the show. Another prominent example is Abraham getting Spared by the Adaptation, as he wishes he could've given him at least one scene interacting with Negan as opposed to his sudden death in the comics.
- Maggie had absolutely no reaction to the absence of her sister for an entire season (Seasons 4B and 5A combined), and it rubbed many viewers the wrong way that she never spared a single thought about Beth until "Coda", which even then felt ridiculous. "Them" takes a scene out to address this: Maggie was so broken by the death of her father that she had assumed Beth had been killed as well until "Coda", even after Daryl's somewhat shaky claim that she was alive after being abducted by Grady cops.
- Many viewers have expressed fatigue with the "come-down" episodes after climactic season finales and premieres as the show goes on. Season 6 surprised many with the episodes "JSS", "Thank You", and "Here's Not Here", all of which had either loads of HSQ or in "Here's Not Here"'s case, gave the show one of its best episodes. The climactic mid-season premiere, "No Way Out", was also followed by the much Lighter and Softer featuring the debut of a beloved comic character and a romance many fans had been clamoring for, and was seen as a refreshing change of pace for the series.
- Season 6’s infamous cliffhanger ending was intended to get people talking about the show during the hiatus before Season 7’s premiere resolving things. The cliffhanger went over poorly and was criticized for denying pay-off to the season’s plot in what was widely called a gimmick or a cop-out. After months of mostly negative reception to the cliffhanger as opposed to hype, Robert Kirkman admitted that the show had learned it’s lesson and they would never end a season in such a way again.
- A lot of fans blamed Daryl for inadvertently getting Glenn killed in the Season 7 premiere, and "Hearts Still Beating" seemingly showing that he was Easily Forgiven at the Hilltop, where Maggie lives. "The Other Side" reveals that ever since Daryl has arrived back at the Hilltop, he has not spoken to Maggie at all, and even has an entire scene where Daryl tearfully confesses to Maggie that he feels like it's his fault over what happened, even after she tells him that he had no reason to blame himself.
- Season 7 undoes Morgan's highly unpopular turn to pacifism, as he brutally kills the man responsible for Benjamin's death and later fully participates in the climactic battle and ensuing war.
- In the "All Out War" comic arc, Eric's death by Boom, Headshot! was criticized for being too abrupt, and another pointless way to create more war casualties and rob another character of their relationship (Aaron). "The Damned" and "Monsters", episodes which adapted the aforementioned death, changed it to being a slower death by a stomach gunshot wound, and having Aaron and Eric sharing one last tear-filled conversation and kiss before the latter's reanimation. This was seen as more effective and tearjerking by viewers.
- In the Season 8 finale, Rick and Michonne spare Negan and ignore their friends' wishes to kill him, angering many fans who wanted Negan to die as well. Season 9 sees Rick and Michonne contend with a lot of stress and backlash from their allies as they face the realistic consequences of such a controversial move.
- In the comics, The Unreveal of Beta’s pre-apocalypse identity was considered laughable since it’s played as more of a bizarre comedic bit upon the character’s death, especially jarring for a pretty intimidating villain. The show develops Beta’s backstory considerably more than the comic, and the reveal of his former identity is handled with much more dignity and gravitas.
- Beta's death being stabbed in the eyes by Daryl and devoured by his own horde is regarded as better and more dramatic than his abrupt, almost comical demise in the source material.
- Sebastian suffers a surprise Death by Adaptation in a dramatic reversal of what happened in the comics, where he controversially killed Rick in what turned out to be the third-to-last issue of the series. Not only is comic Rick avenged, but Sebastian also gets a nuanced Death in the Limelight that makes him a much more fleshed out character who suffers a much more satisfying death.
- For years, fans complained about the show's Bowdlerization in regards to characters not being allowed to say the word "fuck" outside of a handful of instances that are bleeped out or can only be found on the DVD due to the show being edited for television. This is most egregious with Negan who, in the comics, is known for his frequent use of the Cluster F-Bomb. Even fans who thought Negan's comic dialogue would sound ridiculous in live action were livid over him not at least getting to drop the occasional F-bomb, especially since other shows airing on AMC around the same time (such as Better Call Saul) had no problems pushing the limit on their use of vulgar language. Season 11's "Trust" finally allows Daryl to say "fuck" uncensored, followed by Negan at long last two episodes later. All but one episode of 11C ended up having a character say the f-word, with the series finale even dropping two and Negan getting an especially memorable one in "Family", much to the delight of fans.
- It had long been a point of contention how, outside of one scene in Season 8, the show tip-toed around the issue of Negan pressuring women into marriage despite claiming to despise rape and killing one of his men who was trying to rape Sasha being framed as a Pet the Dog moment for Negan. Given Negan's Heel–Face Turn in Season 9, it seemed as if the show was trying to downplay his problematic behavior in order to make his development into an Anti-Hero more palatable. This made it difficult even for fans who had otherwise enjoyed his redemption arc to sympathize with him. "Outpost 22" addresses this by including a scene where Ezekiel finally rips into Negan for his past behavior and explicitly identifies his system of picking up wives as forced coercion. Negan himself also shows remorse for this in addition to his other heinous actions, in contrast to his earlier assertion that all the women he pressured into his harem "made a choice."
Seasonal Rot:
- Besides Season 2 (which being the second season of the show is designated to Sophomore Slump below), Season 6 is ultimately seen as a step down from the previous season. The biggest complaints stem from an overindulgence in cliffhangers and fakeouts, stupid decisions and character choices on par with Season 2, and many of the main cast being Out of Focus for half a season. Unlike Season 2, which was well received by critics but not so much by fans, Season 6 is notable for having almost half of its episodes at a ranking of "rotten" on the rating site Rotten Tomatoes. Season 6 also has the dubious honor of having perhaps the most reviled moment of the entire show that many are calling cheap and manipulative: the cliffhanger that forces viewers to wait another seven months to find out who Negan killed.
- Season 7 was not well received by fans and notably features the lowest average viewership since Season 3. The most common complaint is that it has a lack of plot progression, and is mostly about the Saviors humiliating the group and torturing them into submission again and again (even reviewers who concede that this is the point of the first half of the season admit the show goes too far). Other complaints include the level of violence and torture in the season premiere; odd character choices like a Bottle Episode devoted solely to secondary character Tara, Negan himself coming across as too silly or talky; and fan-favorites Carol and Ezekiel being Out of Focus.
- Season 8, despite finally reaching the end of the All Out War arc, was marred with heavy criticism of uneven plotting and poor character decisions (not helped by several production problems and controversial character deaths). Ratings dropped to lows unseen since the second season while gaining only a meager critical edge on the preceding season, which has the lowest Rotten Tomatoes score in the series's history.
- Though not without their moments or acclaimed episodes, the extended run of Season 10 and the first part of Season 11 have received much more mixed reception than the last few seasons. Some felt that the pandemic limitations resulted in a lack of major plot progression and many characters having to remain Out of Focus, as well as some subplots being dragged out and others being seen as a case of Trapped by Mountain Lions.
Ship-to-Ship Combat:
- In Season 4, a fairly intense Tumblr war broke out between Caryl (Carol/Daryl) and Bethyl (Beth/Daryl) shippers, with Caryl as an established Fan-Preferred Pairing for its slow-burn nature and numerous Ship Teases and Bethyl (initially something of a Crack Pairing because of their limited interaction) exploding in popularity after a very intimate hug in the season premiere and their alone time in "Still". Norman Reedus' off-screen chemistry with both Melissa McBride and Emily Kinney only added fuel to the fire. The subject remained heatedly debated until Beth's death in "Coda".
- Daryl/Carol vs. Daryl/Connie started in the back half of Season 9. To say fans can get heated in regards to this shipping war is an understatement. It was then joined by Daryl/Leah in Season 10, though that pairing has much less traction and was taken off the canonical table with Leah's death in the second part of Season 11.
Shocking Moments:
- "Vatos" mostly focuses on the gang tangling with another group of survivors in downtown Atlanta and ultimately the two groups befriend each other, with the Vatos proving to be noble, good men protecting the elderly. At the end of the episode, however, a herd of walkers swarms the survivors' camp, massacring the majority of the people present, including abusive Ed and Andrea's sister Amy, who dies quite the Cruel and Unusual Death.
- "Pretty Much Dead Already" sees the plot of Season 2 finally advance as Shane has a breakdown and brings about an explosive confrontation at Hershel's barn... and Sophia is revealed to have become a walker.
- The finale of Season 2 also brings a dramatic end to the power struggle between Rick and Shane, a huge battle between the cast and a herd of walkers, and Rick becoming a much harder, dedicated leader.
- "Isolation" sees the group encounter a herd of walkers easily a thousand strong, larger than any group so far.
- "Too Far Gone" adapts the climactic prison war and there's plenty of destruction, death, and despair to go around, making it one of the most epic and memorable moments of the series.
- The "Fear the Hunters" arc begins in the Season 4 finale "A" with Rick biting a man's throat out and accepting his dark side. The rest of the arc, and Season 5 overall, piles on the Gorn, Nightmare Fuel, utter carnage, completely promoted Carol to Memetic Badass and Breakout Character status.
- The first three episodes of Season 6, "First Time Again", "JSS", and "Thank You" contained an almighty amount of high-octane action, more walkers than ever before, and a slaughter of countless Red Shirt's that left viewers desperately trying to catch their breath.
- The Season 7 premiere, which features the death of not one, but two main characters, and Carl nearly getting his arm hacked off.
- “The Calm Before” ends with Alpha massacring ten survivors in one fell swoop to lay claim to her territory and establish herself as the dominant power of the region.
Signature Scene:
- Rick riding his horse into Atlanta, with the outbound lanes clogged with abandoned cars and the inbound lane empty.
- The Wham Shot of a reanimated Sophia walking out of the barn halfway into Season 2, moments before Rick puts her down. It turned the show in a whole new direction and ensured that the series is not going to get better or less depressing anytime soon.
- The prison war in Season 4's "Too Far Gone" is just as climactic and memorable as its original counterpart in the comics, particularly because it featured the death of Hershel, The Governor, and at the time apparently baby Judith, before she was revealed to have survived a few episodes later. Hershel's death is now regarded as one of the most tragic moments of the entire series.
- Carol's big moments in Season 4's "The Grove" and Season 5's "No Sanctuary", considering they're pivotal moments in the character development of the Breakout Character she became after them.
- The dumpster scene in Season 6's "Thank You" set the Internet on fire like no other scene for an entire month before its resolution, and will certainly not be forgotten anytime soon.
- The climactic Battle of Alexandria in "No Way Out" was beloved for resolving all of the maligned cliffhangers and plot threads of Season 6A, and included the iconic comic moment of Carl losing an eye.
- The other contender for the most famous comic moment, the introduction of Negan, arrives in the Season 6 finale, and the POV Cliffhanger that leaves ambiguous who he kills set the Internet even more aflame than the dumpster scene.
- The Season 7 premiere finally reveals who Negan killed: Abraham. And then a few minutes later, he kills Glenn, too. Regardless of the controversy (and perhaps partly because of it) surrounding the episode, its become just as iconic as its comic counterpart.
- Whereas Carl losing his eye was an immensely iconic moment in the comics, the TV show one-ups it with the scene where Rick and Michonne find the walker bite on Carl's body. It led to massive fan reaction and is easily the biggest deviation from the comics that the show has ever done.
- The heads-on-pikes scene from "The Calm Before" (adapted from Issue #144 of the comic), and Siddiq's story memorializing the fallen and their bravery, has quickly gone down as one of the most equally tragic and gruesome moments of the entire show, with some even calling it Walking Dead's version of the Red Wedding.
- The flashback scene of Negan returning home to find his wife, Lucille, having killed herself and reanimated as a walker has quickly become popular. Some comic fans have even drawn parallels to the similarly heartbreaking scene of Rick being forced to put down a zombified Andrea.
- Maggie going back on Daryl's deal to let the Reapers leave and killing all but one of them as payback for slaughtering the residents of Meridian has became a defining moment for her character, drawing comparisons to Carol's equally amazing one-woman siege on Terminus.
Sophomore Slump: Most fans agree Season 2 is one of the show's weakest, either because of the Arc Fatigue of searching for Sophia (and its ultimate Shoot the Shaggy Dog ending), because the restricted setting of the farm meant a lack of diverse situations, or because so many characters (especially Lori and Carl) played with the Idiot Ball too much or just stood around Wangsting or having unimportant conversations. With Seasons 7 and 8 now generally being seen as the low point of the series, Season 2 has since been Vindicated by History in some fans’ eyes, but the season is still regarded as one of the show’s weakest.
- That said, even Season 2 can be considered a great season depending on what one likes about the show. The group of characters Season 1 first introduced us to and got us invested in their development as a group are mostly all still around, new characters introduced as short-order cannon fodder are kept to a minimum, and some would say Shane's Black-and-Grey Morality and shared history with many of the characters makes him a more sympathetic villain than the less ambiguously evil Governor/Philip Blake that followed him. The action and excitement level of the last couple of episodes also could hardly be denied. The fact there's still a lingering sense of hope to some of the characters' outlooks and a remaining sense of moral dilemma in carrying out actions which would later be taken for granted as means of survival also makes it at least feel like a necessary transitional season for many of the characters.
Spoiled by the Format:
- Promos for The Talking Dead often tell what they're going to discuss before the episode is over, often spoiling which situations will be resolved or further developed by the end of the episode. It was also a pseudo-spoiler that any actor advertised to appear on the after-show was likely to be killed off in the episode. Since Season 5, they've begun avoiding mentioning said actors until their on-screen death actually airs, billing them as a "surprise cast member". On one occasion, in "Forget", after that strategy began to backfire since it signaled the death of a character, Alexandra Breckinridge was the surprise cast member and her character was never in any danger during the preceding episode. Chris Hardwick and his guests even lampshaded the trend during the promos leading up to it.
  - Judith's absence from Talking Dead's "In Memoriam" segment after "Too Far Gone" raised a few eyebrows and sure enough, she was revealed to be alive a few episodes later.
  - Glenn's absence from Talking Dead's "In Memoriam" segment after "Thank You" was a clear sign to many that the character wasn't really dead. Even host Chris Hardwick and the guests, who had been clearly under the impression that the character was dead the entirety of the preceding episode, made note of it with surprise and the character was revealed to be alive four episodes later.
  - Connie and Magna are absent from Talking Dead's "In Memoriam" after their uncertain fate at the end of "Squeeze". Sure enough, Magna turns up alive a few episodes later and confirms that Connie made it out too.
- The "Previously on…..." segments usually spoil the return of characters like Merle and Morgan by mentioning them for the first time in multiple episodes or even seasons, seasons and generally spoil which elements from past episodes will be developed further in the upcoming one. A notable exception is Morgan's return in Season 5, which left his appearances in TheStingers of certain episodes of the season a surprise.
- The Season 7 trailer thankfully averts this, completely avoiding any new footage of the cast members who were in the Negan lineup and instead largely focusing on Negan himself, the Saviors, the Kingdom, and the protagonists who weren't in the lineup like Tara, Carol, and Morgan.
- Season 8's mid-season premiere outright made "Carl's journey ends" the tagline of the episode, spoiling anyone who hadn't been keeping up that Carl was going to die. The same happened on a much larger scale later that year with the first half of Season 9, which made "Rick Grimes' final episodes" the selling point of the season.
- Season 11’s premiere introduces Stephanie… who is not portrayed by Margot Bingham, who was announced to already be reprising her role in the new season. This immediately tipped viewers who knew of the casting that “Stephanie” was not the actual person.
Squick:
- Talking Dead's description of Eugene and Rosita's relationship. Apparently, it's like a brother-sister relationship... except that Rosita is like "a sister that [Eugene] wants to have sex with."
- Negan having sex with Alpha in "Squeeze". Considering she's been living in the woods for several years her hygiene game cannot have been strong.
- Lance and Pamela have some rather questionable interactions in Season 11, Part 3, where it's strongly implied that Lance lusts after Pamela, who takes advantage of it to toy with him while manipulating him. No disrespect to Laila Robbins or Josh Hamilton, but Pamela isn't necessarily a looker in her old age, and Lance has proven to be a real creep in his own right, making it rather nasty how Lance gets off when she strokes his head and nearly reaches into his pants.
Stoic Woobie: Michonne doesn't convey much emotion, but when she does, you can't help but feel sorry for her.
Strangled by the Red String:
- Season 5B sees Rick develop feelings for Jessie that seem to come out of nowhere and intensify without any real buildup before Rick states outright in "Try" that he's intervening in her domestic abuse only because of her. Then Jessie's husband Pete kills Reg in a drunken attempt to publicly murder Rick, allowing Rick to kill him and start an unimpeded relationship with Jessie, who has no concerns about Rick killing her husband or how her kids might feel about her love affair with their father's killer.
- Season 6B sees Carol and Tobin have an attraction to each other, despite only interacting once prior to the episode in which they make known their feelings for each other.
- Around the same time, Tara and Denise quickly form a relationship. Their first kiss in "Now" comes after an episode where they've had minimal interaction let alone Ship Tease, but in a few episodes, they're in a relationship after the Time Skip.
- Both of Gabriel's relationships in Season 9, with Anne and Rosita, come right the hell out of nowhere, even considering both relationships debuted following lengthy Time Skips. His relationship with Rosita, which lasts longer, doesn't even get much development and he and Rosita break up offscreen during Season 11. It had to actually be clarified by Angela Kang what had happened.
Surprisingly Improved Sequel: Season 9 has been hailed as this by both fans and critics alike after the heavily divisive Seasons 7 and 8. However, see Acclaimed Flop in the Trivia page.

Take That, Scrappy!:
- "First Time Again" gives us this exchange after Gabriel spent the previous season as The Scrappy.
Gabriel: I'd like to help as well.
Rick: (without even looking at him) No. Anyone else?
- In "No Way Out," Ron tries to kill Carl and/or Rick again while they're still surrounded by walkers. Michonne does not hesitate to impale him with her sword. And while some fans were upset over Sam getting eaten alive, several others were delighted to see him go.
- In general, due to the Anyone Can Die nature of the show, pretty much all of the characters listed under The Scrappy either get redeemed later on or get killed off, with only some of their deaths gaining sympathy from the fans.
- Just about everyone cheered for Father Gabriel when he called Dirty Coward Spencer a "tremendous shit" to his face. It's doubly impressive considering Gabriel was once The Scrappy himself.
- Spencer is on the receiving end of this again when he's disemboweled by Negan for trying to get put in charge behind Rick's back. Fans who weren't outright celebrating him getting his comeuppance expressed having no sympathy for him, considering what he was trying to do right up to being killed.
- For those who dislike Dwight, seeing him get beaten up by several Saviors and locked up in the same cell like Daryl before him at the start of "Hostiles And Calamities" is extremely cathartic.
- The Scavengers entered Scrappy territory after they betrayed Rick to the Saviors, and generally put off a sizable amount of fans due to their strange customs providing a lot of Narm. After a season of getting away with their actions scot-free, Simon massacres them all except for Jadis in Season 8's "The Lost and the Plunderers" after their duplicitous ways push him over the edge. Rick refusing to help Jadis escape the junkyard with him also pleased many fans.
- In “Worth”, Eugene finds himself kidnapped by a vengeful Daryl and Rosita, and is scathingly told by the latter how horrible he’s been the past season and a half for betraying his friends just to save his own hide. It was quite satisfying to see Eugene squirm every time he launched into one of his nonsensical rants, only to be shut down and threatened. Even when he turns out to be The Mole an episode later, Rosita’s punch was also seen as well-deserved (which even he admits).
- In Season 9's "Adaptation", Daryl yells at Henry to "wise his ass up" after the latter attempted to stand up for Lydia, the girl whose group is responsible for murdering Jesus. Especially bad since Henry already screwed up in his first night in Hilltop by getting drunk... after he promised to Carol that he won't get himself in trouble, so he has no moral high ground over Daryl in the first place.
- The Hilltop teens Gage and Rodney introduced in “Evolution” quickly earned the ire of fans for being more examples of annoying kid characters who were obnoxious, Too Dumb to Live bullies.^note “The Calm Before” sees the death of Rodney, who may not have deserved his fate but did little to make anyone feel too sorry for him. Gage later dies two episodes into Season 11, and while the situation regarding his death has proven controversial, many fans ended up cheering that he met his end since by then he’d mostly been a cowardly bully.
They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
- A few fans were upset at the serious changes given to Oceanside and view the drastic updates on the community as the show overstepping its balance. This isn't helped by the only named Oceanside resident Pete, who was considered a fan-favorite back in The Walking Dead Michonne DLC, being Adapted Out entirely, quite possibly suffering Death by Adaptation.
- Carl's Death by Adaptation is widely agreed to be the worst decision made by the showrunner since the character surviving the entire comic series was the point.
- Many of fans of comic Siddiq are extremelt disappointed on how he is portrayed in in the TV Show. Comics Siddiq is an Arab American Construction worker who plays the big guy due to be a muscular mountain of a man, TV Siddiq is portrayed by Indian American non-Muslim Avi Nash whonis average height and slim. But the eye-rolling issue is him being portrayed as a somewhat typically Brown Asian/Muslim Doctor guy who is only mediocore combat-wise which is a tired trope for viewers seeing Brown Asian men on screen.
They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
- The mysterious helicopter seen sporadically in the first two seasons was a big source of speculation, and explaining it as just a small cell of surviving soldiers flying over Atlanta was seen as a bit disappointing. It mysteriously returns in Season 8, adding perhaps even more speculation than before to the fire before returning again in Season 9 to airlift Rick to safety.
- It's the beginning of Season 3. Merle is reintroduced after severing his own hand due to T-Dog's clumsiness and then disappearing for a season. T-Dog has likewise survived being reduced to a background character for a season, and, starting with the prison storyline, has just begun to get some focus and character development. The long-awaited confrontation between the two surely must happen before long. Only, it doesn't. T-Dog is randomly killed off and his death is immediately overshadowed by Lori's and even Carol's presumed death within the same episode. All that ever comes of this is a throwaway line from Merle that he hopes T-Dog "went slow."
- On the subject of Merle, most people assumed that his subplot with Daryl, meaning the two being separated in Season 1, their past, their respective Character Development (especially on Daryl's end), conflicting loyalty the two may have to each other or their respective gropes, and reconciliation or final confrontation when the two inevitably meet again was the main character arc for both of them. When the two do finally meet again late in Season 3, they both leave the prison for a while and only end up getting a few scenes together before Merle is abruptly killed off in the penultimate episode of the season. Whatever grudge Daryl might have against the Governor for killing his brother, or whatever other affect it might have had on his character, is barely mentioned again, and Merle himself is practically forgotten.
- A minor example, but the Claimers seem to abruptly drop their "claiming" schtick in "A." Dan's already horrifying near-rape of Carl would have been even more disturbing had he "claimed" him first.
- The Season 5 trailer heavily teased that the group would form an Enemy Mine with Terminus and Gareth becoming the Token Evil Teammate in order to end the apocalypse. This opens up a lot of cool ideas like the moral dilemma of teaming up with a degenerate pack of cannibals for the greater good, and would allow more depth to be put into how Terminus went from a haven for survivors to the horror it is now. In the actual show, Gareth is killed and Terminus is destroyed fairly early on.
- In the Grady Memorial arc, it's established that Dawn Lerner is physically abusive. Then, of all the group members who could have showed up, it's Carol, a newly-empowered survivor of domestic abuse, who ends up helpless in the hospital. Once she wakes up, it seems likely that she will get smacked around by Dawn just like Ed used to, except we'd get to see her react in a completely different way. However, she and Dawn never even interact. While the story arc was mostly for Beth, it still would've been nice if Carol had been used as something other than an unconscious Living Macguffin.
- The 17 day, 500+ mile journey from Atlanta to Richmond is totally glossed over during "What Happened and What's Going On."
- Aside from the fact that Beth sacrificed her life for Noah, our very first glimpse of the Wolves' reign of terror comes through his eyes as he finds his family and group wiped out in the ruins of Shirewilt Estates. As the foreshadowing of the Wolves intensifies and Noah begins to get some focus after settling at Alexandria, he is suddenly killed off. The Wolves finally appear two episodes later and attack Alexandria in Season 6. He never gets a confrontation with the group who killed his family, and he never even learned of their existence before he died.
- The Domestic Abuse plot line in Alexandria would have been more compelling if Daryl had been involved. Carol's experiences and development as a survivor of Ed's abuse are brought into play on how she advises Rick to handle the situation and her interactions with Pete, but instead of giving Daryl something similar through Sam and Ron as a means of exploring his own issues, the storyline just becomes a way for Rick to rescue Jessie and further their already unpopular romance. In fact, much of the discussion on the matter among the group, particularly with Rick, tends to ignore that Pete was also beating his children at all.
- The Wolves' zombie traps. They're given a fair amount of prominence in "Conquer," but in Season 6, the only one we see is never even opened, and we never see the zombified red poncho guy again.
- More on the Wolves. The lack of a direct confrontation at the gate means they never utter the "Little Pig" line from the comics, which would've been yet another wolf-related Fairy Tale Motif after their murder of little red poncho guy. Further, Rick never asked the three questions and heard answers he doesn't like, which could've happened in the same scene.
- The Reveal that there is no cure and Eugene made everything up did shoot a few potential plotlines in the head. The show wouldn't necessarily have to end with a cure being made, now that conflicts have become more about humans fighting humans than Walkers the next few seasons could proceed relatively unchanged. From learning about whatever structure is left over in DC to simply the anticipation of wondering if Eugene's solution would work at all, some interesting things could've come out of that.
- The entire Alexandria arc could have been a major turning point for the series where Rick and Co start to regain a little of their humanity by showing you don't have to lower yourself to the same level as the rest of the world regardless of how bad things get but instead was little more than an idiot plot whose only purpose was to show how much better at surviving Rick's group is compared to the Alexandria citizens.
- While the Time Skip after "No Way Out" was appreciated by many viewers who liked the skipping of the fallout and mourning of the herd invasion, others feel that it could've given the show ample time to develop certain aspects of the show (like the build up of romances between Rick and Michonne, Tobin and Carol, Sasha and Abraham, and Tara and Denise).
- Many fans felt that Negan's introduction to the series, an iconic moment, was ruined thanks to the cheap cliffhanger that interrupts it and completely eliminates the terror and suspense of his introduction since we now have to wait six months for the resolution.
- Due to the Time Skip, we never see Negan's immediate reaction to hearing about his nemesis Rick's supposed death. He only mentions it briefly in passing a few episodes later.
- The introduction of the Whisperers was accused of this by some viewers who were unfamiliar with the source material. The ads for Season 9 began to build up the idea that the walkers were evolving into sentient threats, and when they were revealed to be humans in disguise, viewers who didn’t read the comics called it this trope. Bemused comic readers who did know what to expect have suggested that “Evolution” should’ve held off on revealing the true nature of the Whisperers, arguing that the episode’s build-up was so effective that the show should’ve ended the episode with a months-long cliffhanger to drum up the suspense before Daryl unmasked a Whisperer.
- The actual fighting of the Whisperer War is mostly relegated to the ending of “Morning Star” and the cold open of “Walk With Us”, disappointing those who were expecting a larger conflict like the prolonged war in the comics.
- Some fans felt that an extra episode or so was needed towards the end of Season 10’s original run, as the group is suddenly at the previously unmentioned Tower and have more or less accepted Negan into their ranks. No character is really shown reacting to Negan’s presence, for one, despite his entire motive for assassinating Alpha being to join them. This also could have helped “A Certain Doom” feel less compressed, since that episode ended up being criticized for major story beats like Maggie’s return and Beta’s demise feeling rushed.
- Maggie and Rosita surprisingly never have a conversation in regards to Negan being spared and later freed from prison. This despite that Rosita is the ex-girlfriend of Negan's other victim, Abraham, who she spent the better part of a season trying to avenge, and is thus probably the person who could best understand how Maggie might be feeling on the matter. In fact, Rosita's thoughts on Abraham's murderer surviving to become a valued member of the group are never fully explored, and when Negan eventually apologizes, it's only to Maggie, not Rosita.
Too Cool to Live:
- Hershel Greene ends up being decapitated by the Governor in order to instigate his final battle with Rick, and his death scene is now regarded as one of the most devastating and tragic moments in the series, to the fact that many people point to his death as the exact moment where the show became far too depressing for anyone to actually enjoy.
- Sgt. Abraham Ford was a total badass and one of the many big guys in Rick's group, massacring hordes of zombies and human enemies alike with his amazing combat skills. Sadly, he is the first to be executed by Negan, but shows absolutely no fear to his killer in the process with his last words being "Suck my nuts!"
- Shiva. As amazing, badass, and loyal as she was, having a CGI tiger as part of the regular cast would have broken the story (and the show's budget) cleanly in half, so few people were surprised when she went down fighting a huge herd of walkers.
- Jesus was perhaps the most combat-capable member of the main cast starting in Season 6, but he ultimately dies suddenly at the hands of a Whisperer in Season 9 just as he really begins showing off the level of badassery he displayed in the comics.
- Ozzy and his second-in-command, Alek, from the Highwaymen. After an intimidating introduction they are integrated into the Kingdom after Carol bribes them with a movie as long as they protect the roads from walkers which they do for a while. While hazy, they do prove their worth by recruiting former Savior member DJ to rescue Siddiq, Tara, Enid, Henry and the others from the Whisperers only to die fighting.
Took the Bad Film Seriously: Even during the show’s weakest seasons, character arcs, and episodes, you can always count on the cast to still give it their all for the most part. Even when a character becomes The Scrappy, it’s rare for fans to actually find ground to criticize the actor in question’s actual performance (some good examples would be Laurie Holden as Andrea and Ritchie Costner as Pope).
Trapped by Mountain Lions:
- Both of the subplots focusing on the Scavengers and Oceanside ultimately contribute little to the show as of the end of Season 8. All of the Scavengers except for Jadis are killed, making them pointless additions to the show who exist mostly to betray Rick time and time again. Meanwhile, the Oceanside women do even less, and are just there to be lectured by the group about how they need to fight the Saviors (meaning their eventual joining the war to fight them was seen coming from a mile away). Jadis ends up proving crucial to Rick's departure from the show while Oceanside, aside from a brief subplot about them kidnapping and murdering the Saviors who wiped out their male population mostly exists as the "fourth community" as of Season 10.
- “Diverged”, the penultimate episode of the extended Season 10 run, has gone down as the most forgettable episode of the series due to focusing on Daryl and Carol mostly moping around doing unimportant tasks. Out of all the extended run episodes, this one contributed the least to the ongoing narrative, whereas others at least introduced new recurring allies and villains, told engaging Bottle Episode stories, or in the finale’s case, adapted a fan-favorite one-shot story showing Negan’s Start of Darkness.
- The first part of Season 11 does little to advance the main plot besides Connie's return, with the Commonwealth arc not picking up steam until Part 2 and Maggie and Negan's feud often feeling like a retread (see Arc Fatigue). The Reaper arc ultimately comes across as filler since only a few Reapers get fleshed out, they're defeated by "No Other Way", and the driving plot of Alexandria needing food is negated since the Commonwealth arrives to lend aid anyway. Some fans have speculated that much of Part 1's story was intended to be filler to buy time for the world's state to improve regarding the pandemic, in order for the show to eventually be able to film bigger scenes with more cast members. Indeed, "No Other Way" features the largest group shot of the show since "A Certain Doom".

Unexpected Character:
- The Governor’s extended cameo in Season 5 was a nasty shock to viewers.
- Morales returns in Season 8 in a case of Ascended Meme few could have expected largely because it was such a meme for so many years.
- Laura’s appearance in “Here’s Negan” was a pleasant surprise since she not only took the place of Dwight (who filled her role in the comic but didn’t appear due to the pandemic preventing Austin Amelio from attending filming), but because of her unceremonious death earlier in the season.
- The blond Wolf from Seasons 5-6 makes a surprise cameo in Aaron’s nightmare sequence in Season 11’s “Out of the Ashes”.
Unintentionally Sympathetic:
- Quite a few people see Ron as a Jerkass Woobie. First off, his father was abusive to him, his brother, and his mother. Then Rick kills his father in cold blood and proceeds to date his mother shortly afterwards. His family is nearly killed when the Wolves attack Alexandria, his girlfriend starts hanging out with Carl more than usual (given how quickly Rick advanced on Jessie, it's easy to see why he became so jealous), and then through a series of unfortunate circumstances, the herd of walkers Rick was trying to drive away is brought back to Alexandria, and the herd ends up getting inside. Lastly, he gets to witness his brother getting eaten alive (partly because of Carol's threatening speech to him), followed by his mother. When he pulled the gun on Rick and Carl, some people honestly couldn't blame him for snapping after all of that.
- Surprisingly, some of the Saviors in "Not Tomorrow Yet." The majority of the Saviors are murdered in their sleep, despite Rick's group knowing absolutely nothing about most of them, and several snarl about how Alexandria murdered all of their friends.
- Gregory of all people may be this for some. He's undeniably a coward and a jerk, but he's treated with disdain for kowtowing to the Saviors despite Rick doing the exact same thing. Rick and Gregory both witnessed a member of their community killed brutally by Negan and have subsequently been bullied into complacency. Of course, Gregory exhibits a lot more selfishness than Rick ever has, as while Gregory kneels to the Saviors to save his own skin, Rick is doing it to protect his people.
Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
- Dale spends the entirety of "Judge, Jury, and Executioner" preaching to the group that they shouldn't kill Randall, claiming they can never come back from executing him even if he's a potential threat. Despite the group making numerous solid arguments in favor of killing Randall, such as the fact they can't spare more supplies on a prisoner with winter approaching, the fact he could betray them to his group as revenge, and the fact that he helped his group gang-rape teenage girls, Dale refuses to budge in favor of taking his moral high ground. He even starts ranting at the emotionally unstable Carol that she's basically killing him herself, and never really comes up with a solid argument for sparing Randall. Several fans were more surprised by the fact he suffered Death by Adaptation than they were sad that he had died.
- Andrea's Too Dumb to Live and Idiot Ball tendencies in Season 3 earned her a ton of haters who were actually largely pleased when she died in the season finale, leading reviewers such as IGN to criticize the show for making such an unsympathetic character’s death the emotional crux of the finale. Even promos for the next season described it as a "huge loss" for Rick's group even though fans were largely glad that she was gone. Sure enough, Andrea has only been mentioned twice in the four years since her death as of the start of Season 8.
- Nicholas' death in "Thank You" was supposed to be an Alas, Poor Scrappy ending for an intentionally disliked character. Unfortunately, his body also drags fan favorite Glenn down into a herd of walkers as well, which to many fans cemented him as The Load whose selfishness once again put a fan favorite in danger, though some credit him as an Accidental Hero since his final act unintentionally wound up saving Glenn's life.
- Owen the Alpha Wolf's death. The audience was suppose to believe that he suffered a Heel Face Doorslam, but some had a hard time buying it, and many believed that he was helping Denise out of pragmatism to save his own skin.
- Abraham's harsh breakup with Rosita caused some fans to raise a big What the Hell, Hero?, since Abe's quest to find happiness and a better outlook on life led to him cruelly dumping Rosita just to go chasing another woman who's only shown marginal interest in him. Abraham also never expresses any remorse for the incident unlike in the comics when he did so privately to Eugene. This also applies to Sasha, who we’re supposed to feel sorry for once Abraham dies, but she shows very little regard for Rosita’s feelings until far later, Abraham evidently never having told her just how he broke up with Rosita.
- "The Cell" went to great lengths to flesh out Dwight, his backstory, and make him a relatable and more sympathetic character. Then the next episode, "Service" depicts him cruelly tormenting Rosita for several minutes, destroying a lot of goodwill in the character some fans had developed.
- Rosita's obsessive desire to get revenge on Negan has made a number fans lose a lot of sympathy for her since her actions have indirectly caused a number of unfortunate events to happen to her friends as a result.
- Jesus’ determination to spare the Saviors’ lives as often as possible during the war of Season 8 comes off to most viewers as annoying and repetitive of the show’s tired themes of morality.
- Rick’s ultimate decision to spare Negan. While the show clearly intends to portray this as a good thing, many viewers found it frustrating and anti-climactic considering the last few years of TV devoted to killing him, especially given the atrocities he’s committed. Rick and Michonne all but ignoring Maggie’s enraged reaction to the former’s decision also put off a lot of viewers. Season 9 expands heavily on this, as they vehemently try to protect Negan while ignoring how their friends really felt about the situation.
- Henry is definitely The Scrappy in Season 9 thanks to being a complete idiot who keeps getting people in danger thanks to his own recklessness and often trying to assert his moral high ground over others. He's supposed to be one of the new leads of the show following Carl's Death by Adaptation, but nobody got on board with him and were ultimately delighted to see him be decapitated by Alpha. Indeed, while few fans felt like he deserved it, they were more sympathetic to Carol for the loss of yet another child.
- In Season 10, Magna and Kelly are revealed to be stealing and hoarding Hilltop's food for themselves in the woods, even though Hilltop's supplies are strained to maximum as it is given they've become a refugee camp for the Kingdom. Presumably we're supposed to feel some sympathy for Magna given her Dark and Troubled Past as well as Kelly for suffering from her loss of hearing, but it's still an extremely selfish move and Daryl's What the Hell, Hero? moment towards them is entirely justified.
- The show certainly seems to think the audience should be more attached to newer minor supporting characters like Kelly, Alden, and Beatrice than they likely are, often trying to give them emotional moments that don’t really resonate as we haven’t gotten to know them yet. While the characters themselves are usually not unsympathetic themselves, they’re certainly not major characters the audience has had years to grow attached to. For one example, Beatrice’s death in “A Certain Doom” was apparently intended to be the episode’s emotional death scene, but she had been absent for nearly two seasons before the episode and had never been important to begin with, so most viewers left the episode feeling the heroes had suffered no real loss.
- Leah is certainly the most sympathetic member of the Reapers, and we are supposed to feel bad for her for losing all the Reapers by “No Other Way”. The problem is that the only Reapers who get fleshed out are shown to be violent, irredeemable monsters like Pope and Carver, with the rest simply being grunts. Little development is given to Pope either which doesn’t do us any favors sympathizing with Leah’s loyalty to her family and her blind devotion to the clearly foolish crusade Pope has led them on. By Season 11, Part 2, however, it's clear she is beyond redemption.

Viewer Gender Confusion: A few viewers mistook Kelly for a boy due to her tomboyish behavior and rather androgynous dress style. Interestingly, Kelly in the comics was male, but given a Gender Flip when the producers liked her actress' audition for Connie.
Vindicated by History: Season 2 has been looked at more fondly in recent years after the Seasonal Rot that took place during Seasons 7 and 8. Fans have previously criticized Season 2 for lack of plot progression, stupid character choices and a rescue arc that ended badly. However, Seasons 7-8 ended up doing this tenfold, with the Savior arc being criticized for spending most of its time spinning its wheels for two seasons only to end with Negan being spared despite two seasons of television devoted to trying to kill him. Some of the most reviled character decisions of the show took place during Seasons 7-8, such as Daryl’s rogue attack on the Sanctuary, Rick continuously trying to trust the Scavengers, Eugene’s cowardice, and various characters seeking revenge. This arc also saw the highly publicized decisions of the Negan cliffhanger and a major Death by Adaptation, events that far eclipsed the already turbulent behind-the-scenes issues of Season 2 that culminated in Frank Darabont’s departure. Season 2’s reception has improved since it manages to tell its story in one single season, is more palatable thanks to home release/streaming, and in comparison features far less of the aforementioned complaints. While the newfound appreciation for Season 2 is far from universal, it's certainly noteworthy considering how infamously hated it had been for many years.

Wangst:
- Sasha's severe depression all throughout Season 5 began to grate on fans since the show gave it more focus than on the character development of the other group members.
- Rosita's dark turn after the the death of her ex-boyfriend Abraham and friend Glenn resulted in this thanks to the fact that she become too unsympathetic for her obsessive revenge, indirectly getting others killed because of her actions, lashing out at her own allies for not understanding her, and her character arc coming across as a derailment of Rick's more intelligent plan to overthrow Negan.
Watched It for the Representation: The introduction of Connie and Kelly, played by actresses who are actually Deaf and hard-of-hearing, respectively, has received praise for its accuracy and adding a fresh and interesting new perspective to the storyline.
Win Back the Crowd:
- While Scott Gimple has profusely defended the Season 6 cliffhanger which has received nearly universal negative backlash, he admitted he and the production crew really wanted to deliver with the Season 7 premiere in response to the overwhelmingly negative reception to the cliffhanger. The "Right-Hand Man" clip at New York Comic-Con at least satiated fans who were cynical that the death would even be shown in the premiere.
- After the very divisive Seasons 7 and 8, along with Rick's departure being on the horizon, many fans were ready to call it quits. After Angela Kang took over, Season 9 saw a drastic increase in quality and storytelling, with real character interactions and little to no monologues or characters speaking in riddles. Season 9 has quickly become one of the best in the eyes of many fans, with "What Comes After", "Evolution", and "The Calm Before" being ranked among the best episodes of the entire series. Though the ratings ultimately never recovered from the Season 7 premiere, this well-received season is generally regarded as having recaptured the show's former glory, a trend that continued into Season 10.

YMMV / The Walking Dead (2010)

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