What to Binge This Weekend: The Best 'Walking Dead' Episode for Each Character

Warning: Storyline and character spoilers ahead for The Walking Dead.

It’s been a month since The Walking Dead Season 5 finale, and at least another couple of months will pass before AMC debuts the companion series, Fear the Walking Dead… we feel your pain, Dead-heads.

Related: ‘The Walking Dead’ Spinoff Gets Official Title, Preview

But because any respectable, zombie-fearin’, Daryl Dixon-lovin’ fan can’t let all that time go by without a little blood and guts in his or her life, we’re suggesting a DIY TWD marathon: a re-watch of the best episodes for each of your favorite characters. It’s a way to look back on their greatest moments for the already TWD devoted, and would make a fine introduction to the show for those of you — all three of you, maybe? — who have not yet sampled the fine stew of action, storytelling, and character development that is the zombie apocalypse drama.

Enjoy our suggestions, and feel free to share your favorite episodes for your favorite characters in the comments.

Rick (Andrew Lincoln)
Best Episode: “A,” Season 4

Why It’s a Must Re-Watch: It’s the one where Rick bites Claimer Joe’s jugular vein out of his neck, as Joe and his villainous gang are about to rape Carl and Michonne and then kill them and Rick. It’s a shockingly graphic and brutal bit of violence all around, and though Rick is shaken afterwards, it’s also a freeing moment for the character; he realizes that he is capable of doing anything that is necessary to protect the ones he loves. Bonus: The Season 4 finale also features Rick’s instant classic line, “They’re gonna feel pretty stupid when they find out… they’re screwing with the wrong people.”

Carol (Melissa McBride)
Best Episode: “The Grove,” Season 4

Why It’s a Must Re-Watch: Carol, too, doesn’t shy away from making the tough calls that are sometimes necessary to protect her friends, even though an earlier decision she made led Rick to (temporarily) banish her from the Grimes group. In “The Grove,” one of the best-ever episodes of the series, Carol realizes young, unhinged Lizzie will only become increasingly dangerous to the living around her after Lizzie kills her little sister, Mika, and plans to kill baby Judith. Tyreese can’t bring himself to do what needs to be done, but Carol can, and does, taking Lizzie out into the titular grove and telling her to “look at the flowers” before shooting her in the back of the head.

Daryl (Norman Reedus)
Best Episode: “Still,” Season 4

Why It’s a Must Re-Watch: It’s the Daryl Dixon backstory episode, and one of the few times we get to see the tough guy/loner allow himself to be vulnerable. With he and Beth still separated from the rest of the group after The Governor’s attack on the prison, they take up temporary residence in an old cabin in the woods. Daryl and Beth — “Bethyl” to the supercouple shippers out there, for whom this is the ultimate ep — bond while talking about the past (Daryl’s sad, abusive childhood) and the death of Beth’s dad, Hershel, and Beth tells him he’s going to be the ultimate survivor, because he gets to remain who he is, not who he was.

Glenn (Steven Yeun)
Best Episode: “When the Dead Come Knocking,” Season 3

Why It’s a Must Re-Watch: It’s the first time we see just what a total badass Glenn can be, when Merle locks him in a room with a hangry walker. Oh, Glenn also happens to be tied to a chair when the walker comes at him looking for a nosh, but Mr. Rhee manages to hold the undead dude off long enough to throw himself against a wall, breaking the chair into pointy, weapon-like pieces, and using one of the weapons to stab his reanimated foe. It’s a scene we always harken back to when Glenn finds himself in another dangerous situation (like in that revolving door tragedy that resulted in Noah’s Season 5 death).

Carl (Chandler Riggs)
Best Episode: “After,” Season 4

Why It’s a Must Re-Watch: Carl has proven himself to be a tough kid, who’s seen and done some horrific things. (When was the last time you had to kill your own mother just after she’d given birth to your sister?) In this episode, the first one after The Governor destroyed the prison, Carl proves capable of caring for and protecting the wounded Rick, gathering supplies (the giant can of chocolate pudding!), and defending himself in a couple of near-fatal walker meet-ups. But when he returns to the house where he and his dad have taken shelter and he briefly believes Rick has died and gone to walker hell, Carl freaks out and admits to (a still unconscious) Rick that he’s often frightened, and we’re reminded that he’s just as much the little boy who sat on a roof eating a whole can of chocolate pudding as he is the little soldier who’s had to kill a lot of people and walkers.

Michonne (Danai Gurira)
Best Episode: “After,” Season 4

Why It’s a Must Re-Watch: While Carl is off having his own adventure, Michonne is going solo, having fashioned a new set of “pets” and put Hershel’s reanimated head out of its misery. While Michonne follows the trail of Carl and Rick’s footprints, she flashes back to her pre-apocalypse life, which reveals why she’s always been reluctant to fully engage with the others: She had a child, and a boyfriend… and then she didn’t. It was her boyfriend, Mike, and his friend Terry who became her original set of pets, and in a monologue she delivers while getting closer to finding Rick and Carl, she tells Mike she has found her reason to live. That’s why she breaks into tears when she makes her way to the house where Rick and Carl are and spots them inside. Bonus points for this episode’s ending, one of our favorites, in which a recovering Rick looks out the front door, sees Michonne, and turns to Carl and says, “It’s for you.”

Morgan (Lennie James)
Best Episode: “Clear,” Season 3

Why It’s a Must Re-Watch: We hadn’t seen Morgan since the series premiere, and it’s a heartbreaking state he’s in when he’s reunited with his old pal Rick in this episode — another of the series’ best — written by now-showrunner Scott Gimple. Morgan is hoarding weapons and clearing out nearby buildings to give himself some sort of reason to go on living. He’s crushed, because his son was bitten and killed by Morgan’s re-animated wife, an act that could have been prevented if Morgan had been able to make himself kill the walker version of his wife. Rick, who Morgan had saved in the pilot when Rick first awoke from his coma to learn about the apocalypse, invited Morgan to join his crew back at the prison, but an unsteady Morgan refuses. The episode is a must re-watch before Season 6 begins, when we’ll learn what’s behind the new, Zen-like Morgan.

Tyreese (Chad Coleman)
Best Episode: “What Happened and What’s Going On,” Season 5

Why It’s a Must Re-Watch: Poor Tyreese… he was just too humane for the walker world. His death was almost a certainty after “The Grove,” when he had to participate in Carol’s decision to kill Lizzie, and then learned why Carol had been the one to kill his girlfriend, Karen, in Season 4. Tyreese had grown increasingly dejected about the violence necessary to survive, and witnessing his sister’s bitter, gruesome vengeance against Gareth and his Terminus cohorts may have pushed him over the edge. By the time he’d been bitten by Noah’s walker brother and went through his blast-from-the-past hallucination — The Governor! Lizzie! Mika! Bob! Singing Dead Beth! — Tyreese seemed to have decided that life, as he knew it, just wasn’t worth continuing to fight for.

Hershel (Scott Wilson)
Best Episode: “Internment,” Season 4

Why It’s a Must Re-Watch: One of the finest performances of Wilson’s stellar career is the highlight of this episode, in which his Hershel calmly leads the prison through an outbreak of a virus that is proving to be deadly in the post-apocalyptic environment. Hershel not only lends his medical skills in helping to save many members of the prison community, but he also — sans one leg, remember — goes head to head with a walker to retrieve a vital piece of medical equipment. Sadly, Hershel would die brutally at The Governor’s hand just a few episodes later, but his impact on the group, solidified in “Internment,” continues.

The Governor (David Morrissey)
Best Episode: “Live Bait,” Season 4

Why It’s a Must Re-Watch: He’d been MIA since the Season 3 finale — RIP Andrea — and The Governor’s return in this episode was surprising. Not because he was still alive and kicking, but because he appeared to be a changed man, from his beardy appearance to his quickly-formed bond with a single mom and her daughter. The Gov’s friendship with the adorable Meghan not only brought out the best in him, but also gave us a less cartoonishly villainous picture of the patch-eyed baddie he had become in Woodbury. The episode kicked off the sort of character deep dive that has become a hallmark of the show, that made this season, especially the second half of Season 4, our favorite yet.

Beth (Emily Kenney)
Best Episode: “Slabtown,” Season 5

Why It’s a Must Re-Watch: Beth had proven during her Season 4 adventure with Daryl that she was no longer the timid girl who’d once slit her own wrists, but anyone who still might have underestimated her did so at their own peril in this episode, in which she wakes up — having been kidnapped away from Daryl in Season 4 — in a hospital, beholden, according to its residents, to those who had “saved” her. Beth stood up to everyone from the evil leader Dawn to the lecherous Gorman and the cowardly Dr. Edwards. She’s even responsible for her new friend Noah making it out of the hospital, which, of course, makes their later Season 5 deaths all the more tragic.

The Walking Dead Season 1-4 are streaming on Netflix; Season 5 is available on Amazon Instant Video.