What season was the best?

In terms of counting favorite episodes, season one (9 eps) comes out slightly ahead of season two (8 eps). My ranking of seasons would be:
One
Two
Three & Five (tie)
Four

Not an easy question for an anthology series. I've only ever seen them in reruns so sometimes I'm not sure if I even know what season an episode was on.

It's easy to say season 1. For one thing, it has the best introductory scenes, the best scoring for the opening and closing credits, far less attempts to "shock" the viewer; it seems to be aiming not to please the viewer so much as make him think and feel about what he's watching and what it all means to him. The Twilight Zone in the opening season is by not means always or mostly a bad place to be. It's the dimension of the Imagination, where anything can happen.

Seasons 2 and 3 are good also, and I've found 3 more impressive the last time I watched it (yes, on MeTV). Yet there was a kind of cerebral ""creep" in these "middling" seasons from not that early in the show's run, but not late, either. Think pieces abound. There's a lot of "preaching" in these two seasons; and yet there are many genuinely delightful episodes, too. A good mix here, 1960-62; and yet one can clearly see: the bloom is off the rose. The Twilight Zone had "individuated", to delve into psychobabble here. It had become what it was going to be; indeed, already was.

Season 4, the hour long one, while I wouldn't call it a train wreck, was a let down. Yet some of its episodes are quite good, and there's lots of provocativeness in the stories. There's a lot of "padding" in many if not most of them, and yet there's a small scale sort of "epic splendor" in Of Late I Think Of Cliffordville, Mute, The Parallel, Death Ship and Jess-Belle. Some real clinkers, too, which makes the worst of them, like The Bard, twice as bad as a half-hour stinker.

Final season: at times, in many cases, a return to form. It edgy at times, yet many eps have "familiar" Zone settings and predicaments for their characters to get stuck in. Sometimes it feels downright apocalyptic: Probe 7, Steel, The Old Man In The Cave. The endings of many entries often feels like a "crashing down", as things just fall apart; and with little in the way of closure, and no resolution. The Zone had become primarily what in its earlier seasons it was only occasionally: pensive, downbeat feeling, with Fate taking a larger role than usual. There's less hope and more resignation.