5 Essential The Walking Dead Episodes That Everyone Should Watch At Least Once

"The Walking Dead" went on for 11 seasons, or 177 episodes, and we can all agree that this was at least a few too many. Many viewers stopped watching in the later seasons from sheer exhaustion, and other potential viewers hesitate to get into the show on account of how big it is. 177 episodes is a commitment, especially since a good chunk of those episodes are just set-up for the finales.

With that in mind, we're narrowing the show down to its five most important episodes. These aren't the best episodes exactly, but they're picked to give viewers the best idea of how the show evolved over its eleven seasons. Nothing will ever compare to watching the whole thing of course, but if you want to understand "The Walking Dead" within only five hours, this list is your best bet. And hey, maybe you'll enjoy this sampling of the show so much you'll end up going back and trying out the whole thing. 

Although the goal of this list isn't to pick the best-ever episodes of the show, it's worth noting that "Days Gone By" is indeed one of the best-ever episodes. Written and directed by Frank Darabont of "The Shawshank Redemption" fame, this episode is a riveting, atmospheric introduction to this show's bold take on the zombie apocalypse. 

Perhaps most interesting about this episode is how young and idealistic Rick still is. He's freshly-shaven, short-haired, and he still thinks of the walkers as real people suffering a tragic fate. He kills them when need be of course, but he shows a level of pity and compassion towards them that later-seasons Rick would never bother with. "Days Gone By" shows Rick at his most heroic and idealistic; it's gonna be a slow and steady decline from here. 

What also distinguishes this first episode is how the walkers are portrayed. These walkers are a little tougher and smarter than they'd be throughout the rest of the show; it's clear that the writers hadn't quite settled on what the rules for these zombies would be, which means that some of their behavior rings false to "TWD" fans on rewatch. Still, it offers a good glimpse in what "The Walking Dead" was going for in its early stages, even if the show would ultimately head in a different direction.

"The Walking Dead" was always a dark show, willing to kill off a major character once every handful of episodes in its first two seasons. Still, "Killer Within" is the first episode to make clear exactly how dark it was willing to be. There are expected rules for what sort of character is supposed to be safe in a TV show, and "Killer Within" crosses it with total confidence. 

Outside of the major plot events, this episode helps to underline how much Rick's changed by this point in the show. He's already darker and way more hardened than he was in the pilot, and the world around him has grown hardened too. Also notable is how the walkers have changed by this point, as the show's no longer curious over whether walkers can retain parts of their former selves' souls. The walkers in "Killer Within" aren't individuals but a terrifying force of nature. The rest of this list will skip over plenty of walker-related mayhem, but rest assured that giant swarms happen pretty often in this world. 

For the first five seasons, "The Walking Dead" got itself into a familiar pattern. The gang would come across a new potential home, settle in there for a bit, only for walkers or other humans to ruin it for them. This pattern wasn't quite as monotonous as the show's haters often portray it, but the point stands; by season 5, fans had no reason to expect that any new home the survivors found would last long-term.

And yet, the town they find here actually sticks around for the rest of the series. It goes through some rough times, sure, but it's with this episode that "The Walking Dead" decides to break its established pattern and let the gang find a home that (more or less) stays their home throughout the series. This is the point where the series switches focus from surviving the end of civilization to actually doing the work to rebuild a new one. The show definitely feels different from this point on, for better or worse.

The first three episodes on this list all aired during a period of rising ratings, and this is the episode that saw the viewership peak. This season 7 premiere was watched live by 17 million viewers, a feat it would never again manage to pull off. For the next episode, the viewership dropped down to 12 million. What caused this drop in ratings? Watching "The Day Will Come When You Won't Be," I think you'll have a pretty easy time understanding the reason.

The season 7 premiere is the show at its most shocking and sadistic, as well as its most drawn-out. It's the moment where most fans grew tired of all the darkness, the first moment where killing off a major character didn't lead to higher ratings the following week. This is when the show arguably went too far, and it never quite managed to regain the audience's trust. 

But despite how controversial the episode is, its biggest scene is also one of the most iconic moments the show ever gave us. You've probably already heard what happens here through sheer cultural osmosis. This is one of the most important episodes for the show's legacy, an integral part of understanding how the show played out. 

The most surprising part of watching this episode, if you've only watched the previous four on the list, is how unfamiliar most of the main cast is. Where's Rick, or Carl, or Maggie? These characters who once seemed so vital to the show are absent here, and not necessarily because they've been killed off as you might assume. 

But even for viewers at the time, this episode was jarring. It's an episode that takes place at the start of a six-year time jump, where we get to see baby Judith (introduced in "Killer Within" as a child old enough to be an actual character with a proper personality). The world of "Who Are You Now?" is gentler than the world of this list's first four episodes, but there's still plenty of scary stuff in it to worry about. 

There are no game-changing deaths or reveals in this episode, but I think it belongs on the list simply because it introduces the final era of the series. The characters in this final section of "The Walking Dead" have had a lot of time to make peace with their trauma as best they can, and although the world around them is still difficult, there's more cause for hope than there was at any point in the first seven seasons.