The Walking Dead has no shortage of bad guys, big and small. But who's the biggest,
baddest antagonist of them all? We're here to find out, by ranking every single
major Walking Dead villain from the least impressive to the most brutally fearsome.
First introduced in season seven, Jadis is the leader of a faction known as the Scavengers.
Rick approaches them in the hopes of gaining more soldiers in his fight against Negan and
the Saviors. Jadis is depicted as a curt, cold leader of a handful of loyal survivors.
She lives in a junkyard where she often makes art out of the items that are discarded,
and chooses to speak in broken English.
"Still. Alone you. Need us to save you."
Although her eccentricities make Jadis, whose real name is later revealed to be Anne,
irritating, they're not the reason she ranks as one of the worst villains on the show.
When push comes to shove, Jadis' move is always to extort something out of the people she
has power over. When Rick comes with his hat in his hand, she demands some kind of tribute. When
she agrees to fight alongside him, she eventually betrays the Alexandrians and joins the Saviors,
only to later betray them when the tide of the battle shifts.
In the end, she makes one greedy choice too many, and her entire group is massacred by
the Saviors at the behest of Simon. Her time as a villain is marked by
perplexing character traits and an inability to really impact the outcome of the world.
When Gregory is introduced, he seems like an impressive figure.
He's run the Hilltop colony since the beginning, and by season six it stands as one of the few
safe havens left in the world. However, as the world grows and alliances start to form,
it becomes clear that Gregory is only a peacetime leader — and a very average one at that.
When the Saviors first arrive, he's unable to put up much of a fight and almost immediately
rolls over. Once Rick comes around, he realizes that his people need some muscle
and agrees to help, right up until Rick loses his first battle with the Saviors.
He then declares their deal null and void. After that, Maggie gains popularity as a
leader among Hilltop residents, prompting Gregory to attempt to defect to the Saviors.
Perhaps you've already noticed the pattern here: Gregory gives up at the drop of a hat.
Whenever things get real, he simply quits and joins the other team, bouncing back and forth
between the good guys and bad guys and having little impact on either faction.
"You really gonna stand there and pretend you didn't try to sell us out,
sell this place out? To the saviors?"
"I was working for the side of sanity. I was working for peace."
Hero or villain, a person in the world of The Walking Dead has to make big moves
that might lead to conflict. Even if he's no fighter, maintaining control is key,
and Gregory, from the get-go, never really has control of anyone or anything.
It's rare that a villainous group on The Walking Dead has no distinct leader,
but such is the case with the Wolves. The Wolves are a group of marauders active in
the Washington D.C. area who survive by raiding any living people for supplies,
then using their zombified bodies as bait to attract more prey. They foster a sense
of unease in the area by marking areas they've hit with the words "Wolves not far." Their theatrics
don't end there: They carve a "W" into both their foreheads and the foreheads of their victims.
For all their style, the Wolves don't last very long against Rick's group…
or even Carol on her own. In season six,
after teasing their presence in the area for weeks, they launch a full-on attack on Alexandria.
In the end, however, their attack on Alexandria is nothing more than a surprisingly toothless
display of intimidation. Carol, disguised as a Wolf, successfully slaughters a number of them,
and the Alexandrians are able to repel their forces. So much for the Wolves' ferocity.
"You said it, right? Don't ever be sorry."
All things considered, Gareth is actually a pretty savvy villain. Not only does he lead a large
faction of people, he manages to hatch a pretty clever scheme that brings a lot of unsuspecting
victims into his web. After founding Terminus as a safe haven, Gareth's good intentions are foiled
by a group of hostile survivors who briefly take over. He manages to get the place back,
but only by resorting to villainous tactics. Following this, Gareth grows merciless and
turns his little beacon of hope into a trap for people in the area who hear radio
broadcasts hailing Terminus as a sanctuary. In reality, it's a meat factory for cannibals.
"If it makes you feel any better, you taste much better than we thought you would."
The only reason Gareth ranks so low on this list is simply that his villainy doesn't last
long in the face of Rick Grimes and his survivors. After Gareth captures the group
and attempts to slaughter them for meat, Rick and company manage to escape
and take Terminus out. With everything he built in ruins,
Gareth tracks them to a nearby church and manages to capture Bob. Ultimately, though, his tracking
amounts to nothing as Rick makes good on his promise to kill him with a red-handled machete.
Gareth is neither the most cunning, nor the most threatening villain on The Walking Dead,
but he does manage to build something worthy of infamy.
Unfortunately, his contribution to the world ends there.
Dwight is an enormously complicated villain. However,
that complexity somewhat diminishes his level of success as a bad guy:
His heart just isn't in it. Dwight is introduced as someone who betrays Daryl's kindness on the
road after fleeing the Saviors with his wife and sister-in-law. Eventually, the family returns,
and Negan separates Dwight from his wife and burns half his face off with an iron for his desertion.
After enduring this trauma and spending a good portion of time in solitary confinement,
Dwight emerges as one of Negan's top guys. He's reintroduced to the survivors after
he mercilessly shoots Denise through the eye, and is part of the team that
captures the survivors before Abraham and Glenn are executed by Negan. Basically,
Dwight is an irredeemable bastard at this point in the story. However,
his love for his wife keeps a singular spark of humanity alive within him, and eventually,
he makes the bold choice to turn on Negan and the Saviors and act as a mole for the Alexandrians.
"I hate him. I hate Negan."
For a time, Dwight is a pretty captivating figure to watch, because it's genuinely unclear where his
loyalties lie. In the end, he makes the tough call to do the right thing, and Daryl spares his life
as a result. He's one of The Walking Dead's more understated antagonists, and that makes
him a relatively minor figure on this list, but definitely not in the hearts of the show's fans.
While Joe never leads a large group like Jadis, Gareth, or the Wolves, he gets major points
for being a seriously evil person. He's first introduced as the leader of a very small group
of marauders called the Claimers. They roll into a house that Rick happens to be hiding out in and
quickly demonstrate their depravity. Rick manages to escape them, but not without killing a Claimer.
While tracking Rick down for revenge, Joe meets and befriends Daryl and explains his
philosophy on leadership. Joe manages to keep his small group in line by issuing one major rule:
Anyone who claims something owns it by right. Those who violate this rule are punished with
a beating, "or worse." The Claimers are a small faction because Joe deals with
internal conflicts by straight-up killing the person who is at fault.
When Joe catches up to Rick, he threatens to kill Daryl and assault both Michonne and Carl.
He genuinely gets one over on Rick, but only briefly,
because Joe underestimates his opponent's savagery. Rick rips out Joe's throat
with his teeth, putting an end to his misguided worldview right then and there.
"Fell apart? I never looked at it like that.
Seems to me things are finally starting to fall together. Least for guys like us."
Sometimes, the scariest villains are the ones who are convinced they're the good guy.
When Dawn is introduced, she's several years into the apocalypse,
but is still holding out hope for a government rescue.
Dawn presides over a hospital that she and a handful of other survivors,
cops, and physicians have turned into a very tense safe haven. With resources dwindling, Dawn allows
all sorts of horrific crimes, all in the name of keeping their way of life going until a government
rescue arrives. This is, as the audience knows, a long wait for a train that simply isn't coming.
"Try to look at the good we're doing.
Hard as it was, we saved Joan's life. Trevett's life. We saved your life."
When Beth arrives as a patient, she's given a crash course in Dawn's deeply and profoundly
misguided way of leading. When Beth befriends a guy named Noah, they hatch a plan that half-fails,
and only allows him to escape. While Beth stays back and faces the consequences from one of
Dawn's men, it becomes clear that Dawn is losing control, prompting her to do something drastic.
When Beth's group comes to negotiate a trade for Beth and Carol, who has been
injured and brought to the hospital, Dawn tries to prove herself by demanding they
get Noah back as well. Driven to madness by her brief time with Dawn, Beth stabs her.
Dawn reflexively shoots her, and is immediately shot dead by Daryl.
The Governor, AKA Philip Blake, deserves high honors for being The Walking Dead's very first,
through-and-through, honest-to-God villain. Prior to his arrival, the worst threat to
humanity is Merle Dixon. When Daryl's brother is finally seen again after more than a year, he's
following the Governor's orders — which really says something about the company Blake keeps.
When the Governor is introduced, he is revealed to have accomplished what Rick has failed to do:
He has created a working society within the zombie apocalypse. While the show
has since seen a bevy of strongholds from both good guys and bad guys take shape,
the Governor is the first to do it. It's not exactly a success, however:
Things get very dystopian there only about a year or two out from the onset of the apocalypse.
"You know all about me and I know all about you. I don't care about any of that.
We're here to move forward."
What really makes the Governor a top villain isn't his leadership,
but his madness. There's just no telling how he'll wield his power from moment to moment.
Even his demise comes as a result of his own lunacy. Upset over the loss of Woodbury
and its people's assimilation into the prison, he drives a tank through one of the only safe
havens left in the world, and dies trying to exact physical revenge on Rick Grimes.
Alpha is curt, cold, and has no time for any weakness in her ranks. She survives by leading
a group called the Whisperers, who live among the walkers and even manage to control their
movements through herding tactics. She is the first to recognize that the walkers are the weapon
that brought humanity to its knees, making even the mightiest people and institutions fall. So,
when she encounters Rick's group, she has very little time for their emotionality and
moral compunctions. However, since they've captured her only daughter,
Lydia, she has no choice but to roll through them with brutal vengeance.
The war with the Whisperers becomes one of the strongest conflicts in the series. Though Beta,
Alpha's right-hand man, does most of the heavy lifting, she's the one who herds enough walkers
to basically wield this world's equivalent of a nuke. Alpha is one of very few villains on The
Walking Dead who doesn't underestimate her opponents, and that counts for everything.
"They all follow me by choice. Cause I make em strong."
Even people with a cursory understanding of The Walking Dead know that Negan is the
greatest antagonist the show has ever seen. Although he spends a majority of his time
on the show on a path to redemption, he wouldn't even be alive if it wasn't for his ruthlessness.
When Negan is first introduced, he infamously kills Abraham and Glenn for no other reason
than to demonstrate his power. Negan has a twisted way of always making "good" decisions:
He views people as a resource. This means he's not a loose cannon homicidal
maniac like the Governor or Joe — his conflicts are calculated, and he knows
who will live or die before he even begins a conversation. When it comes to leadership,
he differs from Jadis and Dawn in that he knows success lies not in keeping people
going, but in giving them an opportunity to thrive, hence the Sanctuary's point system.
"Let Mark's face be a daily reminder to him and to everyone else that the rules matter."
However, the main thing that makes Negan such an effective villain
is the fact that he's capable. Unlike Gregory or Dawn, when push comes to shove,
Negan can fend for himself. He boasts the smartest and most broken mind in any room,
and is enormously capable of exerting his will on the people around him.
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