When the sixth season of The Walking Dead ended with a cliffhanger mystery of who Negan killed with Lucille, it left viewers of television’s most popular series at a loss for words. After leaving fans dangling during arguably the comic book’s most famous scene in such a drastic way, The Walking Dead had to deliver on the other side of the cliffhanger. Somehow, they did.
*** Warning: The following contains detailed, thorough, binge-watching-ruining, DVR-tape-delay-ruining, you’ll-hate-yourself-for-the-rest-of-eternity-for-finding-out-before-you-are-supposed-to spoilers for the TV show and the comic book. ***
Six months. Fans of The Walking Dead had to wait six months to find out who the newest supervillain on the block, Negan, killed with his trusty barbed-wire bat Lucille. Through those six months, the fan theories, YouTube videos, conspiracies, and inquests into who was taping what on the set ran wild. After waiting those six months, the television show had to up the ante. Given the importance of the scene to the show and the source material, the cliffhanger was a very risky gamble to take.
It could have been viewed as a no-win situation, quite honestly. Take the faithful step aligning with the comics and have Negan take out Glenn and you’ve left viewers hanging for a reveal that would not be a surprise to most. Have Negan kill someone other than Glenn from Rick’s traveling band and it could come off as anti-climactic if a less important character in the grand scheme of things met their gruesome demise.
In the end, The Walking Dead realized they didn’t have to choose one or the other, they chose both.
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If there’s one criticism of the Season 7 premiere, it’s that it took 20 minutes to finally get us to it. Perhaps the producers thought that another 20 minutes wouldn’t hurt after thousands of minutes gone by in the summer, but it felt a bit like a slap in the face to those loyal viewers who did come back to find out the result and didn’t walk away. Correction: it felt like getting slapped in the face while time was moving around you in slow motion. To add insult to injury, the show played flashbacks of each character, teasing which one might be it in Negan’s game of Lucille Roulette.
Finally, it emerged that Abraham was the one to meet his maker. That choice seemed like an easy way out — avoid the revolt that would come with killing ultra fan-favorite Glenn, do something different that would put the show’s own stamp on the scene, and not take away a main character crucial to the story going forward. (In the comics, Abraham was already dead and Denise got the death that was originally his last season — an arrow through the back of the head.) You’d be forgiven though if you thought to yourself, “I had to wait six months for that? Hmpf.”
Then The Walking Dead somehow delivered on an incredible and shocking plot twist that wasn’t really one at all.
The great rush of wind you probably felt just after 9:20 p.m. was all the Glenn fans breathing a sigh of relief that their favorite character had escaped certain doom once again. Just a couple minutes later, all that wind was sucked back up by gasps as Negan swung for the fences and took his second victim. After Daryl lashed out at Negan for killing Abraham, he turned around and abruptly added Glenn to the list of casualties.
In that moment, the television series found a way to add a new twist to the source material and stay faithful to it at the same time. With a series so popular and so meticulously scrutinized, it’s actually an impressive feat. After all that time between Season 6 and Season 7, The Walking Dead delivered a moment that simultaneously felt paralyzing to watch and yet somehow worth the wait.
Glenn’s death, as gruesome and graphic as it was, played out exactly as it should have if you wanted the series to follow the comic’s climactic blow-by-blow account. And for those people who are now tapping out from TWD because Glenn’s death was too traumatic or too violent or too whatever… what show have you exactly been watching for the last six seasons? This is the same series that has seen its moral compass decapitated and mentally disturbed children shot in the back of the head. The Walking Dead isn’t going to just now begin to protect your feelings.
Maybe it’s giving the producers too much credit, but now some of last season’s decisions make sense in retrospect. Abraham’s extra time granted him a more meaningful death scene that added to the drama and originality of the series. Glenn’s false death scene at the dumpster that everyone rolled their eyes at gave his television character a sense of invincibility that ran through the cliffhanger and through the first 20 minutes tonight. That aura was effectively shattered with one extra swing for the fences from Negan.
And perhaps most importantly, the episode cemented Negan as the character The Walking Dead needs him to be: the ultimate rival to Rick and by far the biggest villain the series has ever had. Negan’s slaying of Abraham and Glenn may not have even been the most frightening moment of the episode. That moment came when he almost forced Rick to chop off his own son’s arm in front of all of his friends. It was truly a scene that felt like something out of a horror movie and a nod to Rick’s journey in the source material (where he lost his own arm a long time ago).
The scene also gave an extra sadistic layer to Negan’s character. Not only is this man a brutal butcher, he’s also a psychological terror who has left Rick a broken man at the end of the episode. And he’s the most charismatic character the series has had though Negan has appeared in only two episodes. In the midst of such a dark series and such a brutal episode, some morbid humor is a nice change of pace from time to time.
With a show about a zombie apocalypse entering its seventh season, it’s hard for The Walking Dead to shock and awe its fans, or even those people that claim to hate-watch the series. Nevertheless, with the television series reaching its most important moment to date in the Season 7 premiere, it showed that it can still deliver both chills and thrills.
