After 11 long seasons and waves of incoming and outgoing viewers, AMC’s mainline The Walking Dead series has at long last come to an end.
Back in 2010 when the series first aired, the world was still warming up to meme culture. Part of The Walking Dead’s appeal was its presence in the advent of social media; it’s one of the earliest TV series to feed into it, and all the early memes that came with it.
While we may have a Rick and Michonne reunion, a Daryl Dixon solo adventure, a Maggie/Negan escapade, and more Fear the Walking Dead to look forward to, we don’t think anything quite as iconic as the list below from the OG series will ever come to fruition from the upcoming projects.
To celebrate the end of this era in television history, we present you with 15 memes from The Walking Dead that infected the internet over its t12 year runtime.
Don’t Dead, Open Inside
Kicking things off, let’s cast our minds back to the very beginning, when Rick awakened in a hospital following the initial clamor and panic following the beginning of the zombie apocalypse, to discover the handiwork of someone with really bad grammar.
Dale Face
Another familiar, but long-deceased face from the early days was Dale, who spent approximately nine out of every 10 minutes of his screen time looking at people with the level of disgust you’d expect when someone’s left an upper decker on your toilet.
Sophia the Hide and Seek Champ
Moving a little bit further down the timeline now; remember when the show spent an entire season on a farm looking for a little girl who turned out to be in the barn the whole time? It’s a wonder people didn’t lose interest and bounce over whatever the next best thing on cable was before Game of Thrones.
Everyone hates Lori
When Lori was still alive and well in the early days, the internet didn’t share the love that Rick felt for her. In fact, she was downright despised to the point where fans borderline celebrated her demise. Gabriel turned out to be equally annoying for a time, until he finally put his big boy pants on in later seasons.
Spaghetti Tuesdays
We think we speak for everyone when we say we really miss Santa-spec Hershel and all of the wisdom and humor that he came with. Until the stupid Governor just had to hack his head off. His declaration in the middle of a dire flu outbreak in the prison of having Spaghetti Tuesdays every Wednesday was something that well and truly resonated with The Walking Dead fanbase at the time.
Carl Poppa
At the peak of its popularity, the YouTube channel Bad Lip Reading was periodically releasing The Walking Dead compilations of, well, bad lip reading of the show. It was always a blast, from “I hate that freaking turtle,” all the way through to the iconic Carl Poppa.
Stuff, Things
The Walking Dead was always a bit of a slow-burner of a show, focussing on building thoroughly fleshed out characters and relationship dynamics. You would expect that such a show had impeccable dialogue. Alas, that wasn’t always the case, particularly if you remember the “stuff, things” fiasco.
Blind fire
There’s an image that made the rounds during the prison and Governor arc of the show, which was a bit of a continuity oversight. The Governor looking down the sights of an assault rifle with a blind eye tickled the ribs of many a Walking Dead fan.
More blind fire
Seriously, this show had a problem with visually impaired folks scoping at the enemies with their bad eyes.
Eye puns
While we’re on the subject of folks with one eye, remember when the internet exploded with eye puns when Carl got his eye shot out by that sheltered Alexandrian kid, who was aiming for Rick but missed by a country mile?
Look at the flowers
In one of The Walking Dead’s most harrowing episodes, “The Grove,” Carol puts down an absolute pest of a child who is convinced that zombies are friendly teddy bears and everyone’s better off being one, even having killed her own sister to prove the point. Carol asks her to turn around and look at the flowers and puts a round in the kid. This of course spawned numerous “look at the flowers” memes.
Who did Negan kill?
Possibly the absolute pinnacle of The Walking Dead-related buzz on the internet was the cliffhanger ending of season six, when Jeffrey Dean Morgan stepped out of a trailer as Negan, made a big speech, and beat the living daylights out of Glenn Aand Abraham with his trusty bat Lucille. Of course, we didn’t know that at the time, and damn if that wasn’t a lengthy wait for the season seven premiere.
Daryl’s crying face
Over its twelve year run, Daryl Dixon unquestionably had the most plot armor of anyone else on the show thanks to all of the Norman Reedus Stans out there. Which is why said Stans would likely rather forget that such an image of Daryl exists.
Coral
Speaking of crying faces , we saved the best until last. Ladies and gentlemen, likely the most iconic meme to ever come out of The Walking Dead: Rick wailing at Carl after discovering that Lori died. We’ll leave you with a few variations of this one.
Titanic is syncing
How do I smell?
Mom is kill
