Season Premieres:

Bargaining
Anne
When She Was Bad
WTTH/The Harvest
The Freshman
B vs. D
Lessons

Hmm. My season and finale rankings, with skating-style Technical Merit and Presentation scores (presentation being the tiebreaker). I'm using technical merit for how well I think the arc hung together, pacing, etc., and presentation for my emotional reaction to it:

S2 (5.8/6.0)
S3 (5.9/5.9)
S4 (5.4/5.6)
S5 (5.2/5.6)
S7 (4.8/5.7)
S1 (5.2/5.2)
S6 (4.8/3.8)

Finales:

Becoming I/II (6.0/6.0)
Chosen (5.9/6.0)
GD I/II (5.9/5.9)
Restless (5.8/5.9)
Two to Go/Grave (5.7/5.9)
The Gift (5.6/5.9)
Prophecy Girl (5.7/5.7)

IOW, I rank the finales much more tightly than the seasons. Joss & Co. definitely know how to go out with a bang.

The finales are too hard for me. I loved all of them for very different reasons except The Gift.

Finales:

Two to Go/Grave
Becoming I&II
Restless
Chosen
Prophecy Girl
Graduation Day I&II
The Gift

Season Openers:

WTTH/The Harvest
Bargaining
When She Was Bad
Lessons
The Freshman
B vs. D
Anne

I can't rank the season openers. I like every one, and they're all so different. (Geeky moment - people answered my question! Yay :))

Hey Daniel. I had a message explaining why I really wasn't that interested. But it felt kinda dismissive of people who actually liked season 6. Feel free to try and convert me.

IMO, if you really didn't like S6, the finale's not worth seeing.

AH's acting is amazing, but I found everything else about it pretty cringeworthy.

Rankings? I don't need no stinking rankings. My mind is like Chicago weather on this one, if you don't like it, wait five minutes, it'll change.

I'm with erika on rankings.

Except for Season 7. I liked some of the individual episodes but overall it's too painful for me to watch and I still fastforward through most of Chosen. So it ranks LAST.

Other worthy season 5 eps. (IMO) - Intervention, The Real Me, Tough Love, Forever, No Place Like Home (I think that was what it was called), Checkpoint & the Replacement. The rest of the season was soooo weak. I didn't mind Riley going dark, just the way they ended it. But the arc stuff was painfully slooooooow. It makes sense in retrospect (because Glory was Ben a lot), but Ben was such a fount of anti-charisma that it didn't matter. Plus, this was all happening during the beige-Angel arc, so it was a stark contrast.

Ken is me here. Despite what everyone says, season 5 will always be my favorite season (not the one I think is the best) because that is when I found the Buffistas. My viewing experience has been transformed.

My rankings in terms of favorites - 5,2,3,1,7,4,6.

My rankings in terms of quality - 3,2,1,7,5,6,4. (After 3 and 2, though, the list changes by the nanosecond).

Season finales:

"Becoming II" - this episode (and Becoming I should count as well) belongs in the list of the greatest dramatic hours of television ever.

"The Gift" - I actually felt like somebody really died. It took me a couple of days to get over the episode. Plus, it seemed like the internet exploded right after this aired. Since I didn't see "Becoming" "live", this episode had the strongest emotional impact on me for any of the finales.

"Restless", "Prophecy Girl","Graduation Day", and "Grave" - I can't force myself to pick one over the other, because every time I think about a particular episode, I think "how can I rank this behind the other, it's got Dreamsequences Idon'twantodie thinnestmetaphorever brokenyellowcrayon". Points get taken off of "Grave" if you don't include "Two to Go", because that had the Best.Entrance.Ever.

(Restless isn't considered the S4 finale. Primeval is the finale, and Restless is the coda.)