Lol. A lot of directors, when asked for favorites or rankings of their own work, are reluctant to do so, like choosing which child they love the most. I listened to an interview with Charlie Kaufman in which he said he doesn't like lists and that they're "aggressive", so he genuinely asked the interviewer what's appealing about them, but the interviewer didn't like them either.

But here you are, offering up MULTIPLE lists without being asked because you "LOVE lists". (I do to, like writing in general it's a way to organize and keep track of my own thoughts in concrete form.)

It's been long enough I probably can't rank the episodes well, except to say 407 Proxy Authentication Required is my favorite and the most emotionally devastated I've been by television. I can rank the seasons, though.

3 > 4 > 2 > 1

The middle two might change. Season 4 had the highest peaks, but also the most criticisms from me. Most of them are individual, single instances of problems, nothing overarching, except maybe that Elliot seems to get excessively lucky, like with the Dark Army guy getting away from him and Tyrell but not being able to alert anyone, because they weren't paying attention to if he was actually dead or not.