WARNING: Spoilers ahead. Do not pass GO, do not collect two hundred dollars!
Negan is one step ahead of us, every second.
The way that Walking Dead is written, it dangles a carrot out in front of us. It leaves a bloody mess, an axe in plain sight, a swarm of walkers that we stroll through, sure that our nemesis will meet his maker, only to realize that our nemesis is our maker and is pulling the strings the entire time.
As the premiere of Season 7 unfolds, that carrot hangs out front, our finger tips able to graze it, to feel the air as it whizzes by. Hanging from Negan’s hand.
It all centers on Rick, as he flashes back to memories of each of his friends, his family, and the moments that were important to him. He’s thrust into an incredible situation, losing someone close to him, and it’s because of his leadership that it happens. It weighs on him, like a mountain of bricks.
When we see the pivotal scene unfold, that carrot essentially dangles in front of our teeth. We can taste it, we can even start to nibble. But just when we think we have it, it’s pulled back and further away than ever.
“I’m just getting started”
Negan utters those words after he decimates us — not just with his murder of Abraham, but as he repeated the act against Glenn. Any of these losses would have been tough, but Abraham’s story was complete. Last season he went on an existential journey in which he managed to wear a pristine Sergeant’s uniform, defining his self-created character. Even though he was delusional, and we all knew it, he was happy living and dying in his fantasy.
Glenn’s death, however, was heart wrenching. No, not because it was Glenn, but because of how it broke us. “Maggie, I’ll find you.” Those words, said after his brain was firing across all of its dying synapses, after he was essentially dead, were the words that defined him as a character. He was always looking for Maggie, to find her, return to her, help and provide for her. And in death he was doing much the same thing. His brain knew it, in a way, that he was sacrificing himself so that she could live.
The terrifying part is perhaps that Negan knew it, that he anticipated ahead of time how his actions would affect the survivors. Glenn’s dying profession of love was the cherry on top. After all of that he knew that he destroyed them.
But even that wasn’t enough. He wanted to own them.
“You belong to me.”
By putting Rick into unbelievable situations (hanging from the body of a zombie, nearly forcing him to cut his son’s arm off) Negan breaks him. He turns him into a dog. He forces him to do whatever he wants. Negan doesn’t just want to rule his world, he wants everyone else to know that he does. He’s an impossible bastard of a man. Negan has become the most vile human on TV, perhaps surpassing Ramsay Snow on Game of Thrones. He’s so bad, so evil, and that makes him so good. He stands with a swagger, swinging his barbed wire bat Lucille like the ultimate phallic embodiment. He’s not just the Alpha male, he’s the Omega male.
Possibly for the first time in the series we see Rick completely, utterly gutted. In the moment when Negan forces him to swing the axe, he becomes a husk of a human. He cries, he sputters, he spits. He doesn’t know what to do next. The solid Rick, the “Ricktator”, the one who has the answers, can only search his thoughts for reason, grasping at anything that he can. He ultimately finds nothing. He has to fall, and he knows it. It’s astonishing that Carl seems to have the strength to accept fate, telling Rick to go through with it.
The Rick we know is gone.
Negan has proven over the course of last season (from the shadows) and his emergence since that he knows the world better than anyone else. It is not going to get better, it is not going back to the way it was. The world cannot be happy.
“Bet you thought you were all going to grow old together, sitting around at the Sunday table… It doesn’t work like that, not any more.”
That final worm planted into Rick’s mind is there to put the point on the end of the sentence. Rick, nothing you do will change the way the world is, especially not your pretty Alexandria. The echo of that fleeting thought — the Sunday Brunch scene showing an ideal future — will never happen.
But there’s at least a flicker of light. Maggie, in the lowest point of her life, may have lost the baby in her belly but has replaced it with a fire that she hasn’t had before, swearing to take on Negan. As the episode ends and the defeated survivors (if you can even call them that any more) head home, Rick notices the axe on the ground. Perhaps sensing that he’s not quite dead yet he picks it up.
With expert pacing, admirable fan service, tearjerkers and surprises, the Season 7 premiere of The Walking Dead is perhaps the best of its series. Not for what we lost, but for what we don’t know that we’ve gained.
And the carrot dangles again.
Images courtesy AMC.
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