The Walking Dead 609: No Way Out reader rating and response
The hype surrounding last weekend’s mid-season premiere of The Walking Dead had been pretty intense, so we posted a poll asking how many stars viewers would give it. As usual, the viewers did not disappoint. Keep reading to see a sampling of the reactions we got to our poll.
If there’s a group of people able to work themselves into a frenzy over a TV show, it’s fans of The Walking Dead. After waiting several long months for the show’s mid-season break to end, and to find out the fate of our favorite characters, every one of whom were facing danger of one kind or another as the credits had rolled back in November, expectations about Sunday’s show were high.
This is always a dangerous position for a TV show to put itself in, since high hopes can lead fans to either euphoria over a desired outcome or bitterness if they end up disappointed. However, judging from fans’ reaction after Sunday’s episode, however, the creators of The Walking Dead have once again made a gamble that paid off.
Related Story: The Walking Dead 609 episode review: No Way Out
Before I discuss the results of this week’s poll, I need to explain one change that we’ve made in our polls. A few weeks before the mid-season break, we started asking for our fellow viewers of The Walking Dead to rate the episodes each week. The polling system we were using was slightly different, and allowed us to have you give a rating out of five stars.
While the show was on break, however, we learned that we would no longer be able to use that same polling system, and we have now switched to using Twitter polls. Therefore, our ratings will henceforth be out of 4 stars (the best rating), so if you were to compare the ratings for episodes 607 or 608 with episode the most recent one, 609, it might appear that something is amiss. It isn’t, so please don’t panic.
That being said, I can tell you that the results this week were rather dramatic. Of 335 respondents, a whopping 89% gave the episode four stars, the highest rating possible. Quite a few people actually voted to give the episode more than four stars when they wrote in comments.
To give you an idea, of the other two episodes for which we collected this kind of data last year, the highest percent of five star ratings for an episode was 64%, for episode 607. As you can see, it’s quite a substantial jump from 64% to 89%.
While there were small percentages of people who gave the episode less than four stars, they were far smaller. 6% gave the show three stars, 2% gave it two stars, and 3% gave it only one star. And of course, there’s always the chance of user error, since so many of us use Twitter on our phones, and it’s easy to click the wrong thing on such a small screen. Chances are that at least one or two of those low ratings was an accident.
Average Reader Rating: 3.81 stars out of 4 (So yes, you could say that most people liked it!)
Here’s what a few fans had to say about episode 609, aka “the one where Daryl proved that losing his crossbow wasn’t as big a problem as we thought it might be.”
Jules – Actually not enough stars there! I give it a 20+
Walleye King – It’s time for Carol to shoot Morgan and get rid of this liability. He is unreliable and will get good people killed.
Anthony – Top 5 for the whole series! Probably the best one. 10 stars!
shannon l hughes – I luv this episode. I ALWAYS say it gets better and better, and it does.
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There really wasn’t much debate among those people who left comments on this or various other Undead Walking articles across social media. Everyone seemed to be pretty solidly in agreement that it was a great episode. Now we have just a few more days until we find out how episode 610 will compare to last week’s. The bar has been set pretty high, so stay tuned!