Let’s start from the very first problem here, which is that even though we’ve all called the mysterious murder at the end of season six a “cliffhanger,” it wasn’t really. We all knew the minute it was announced that Negan was coming to the show, that he would introduce himself by killing a main cast member. And that’s exactly what happened in the season six finale—he showed up and murdered somebody. We just didn’t find out who. So we haven’t been waiting all summer to see what happened next; we were waiting for a payoff to a scene that we’d not only watched, but that had been promised to us.
The short-term result of the show’s decision was that it kept the audience obsessing for six months, which we did, and ensured we’d watch the season seven premiere (I feel pretty confident guessing the ratings for the episode will be phenomenal.) And the showrunners took every opportunity to hype the “big reveal”—how the cliffhanger would all make sense, how it would shock us, how it would devastate us. By fetishizing this one plot development, the makers of The Walking Dead amplified not only our desire to see it, but our need for it to pay off—to a degree that the show couldn’t possibly achieve.
Moreover, we spent all summer basically considering every possible victim, every possible combination. We even wondered if Rick might get his hand cut off as he did in the comics, and the show teased and fed our suspicions and loved every minute of it. As a result, there was literally no one who could have been killed last night who would have truly been a surprise, which meant the dramatic weight of killing off these characters was negated (no pun intended, actually).
The show backed itself into a corner: Some characters were untouchable, because they form the foundation of the story (Rick, Carl), or because they are fan-favorites (Michonne, Daryl) and killing them would have been such a transparent bid to be “devastating” that they wouldn’t be narratively satisfying. Most of the other characters would also have been narratively unsatisfying, too, because they were too minor to upset any viewer if they were killed (Aaron, Rosita, Eugene, Sasha).
That literally left three people: Glenn, Maggie, and Abraham. For most of the summer I had sincerely doubted that TWD would show a pregnant woman being beaten to death with a barbed-wire-covered baseball bat on TV (although when the premiere seemed like it was going to skip a third-person view of the death, I thought that the show had rather cleverly gotten around showing it while still having the result). But in the end, the negative press that would result was too much for the show, and frankly, that’s fine.
That left Abraham and Glenn. Negan killed them both.
In the end, they chose the two most obvious answers. Thanks to having a summer to stew over it, the “two victim” theory had plenty of time to disseminate around the nerd-o-sphere, so the fact that Negan killed them both didn’t really make the scene any more shocking or give it any more impact.
Oh, it was plenty gruesome. The show even had Glenn’s eyeball fly out. But I just shrugged. The show had built it up too much. I had waited for it too long. And most disappointingly, the answer was more or less what most people had expected all along.
Had this scene played out at the end of season six, it would have been incredible. It would have done everything The Walking Dead wanted from this scene—it would have shocked us because we were still only guessing there’d be one victim back then. We also didn’t know, until the final moments of the finale, which characters would be facing Negan’s wrath in the final scene. The momentum was there. We were all invested.
And had they killed Abraham then, it would have had the impact that the showrunners wanted. And then Glenn’s death would have completely shocked us. It would have horrified us because of the gore. And we’d have felt the surviving characters’ pain and loss. And yeah, that would have been a negative feeling, but that’s what The Walking Dead trades in. More importantly, there would still be plenty of characters to be invested in and keep them watching. These deaths would have been depressing if they’d been in the season six finale; now, all these months later, they are primarily disappointing.
There’s another major problem here, in that everything that happened with Negan is 100 percent Rick’s fault. If Rick hadn’t picked this fight—if he hadn’t had such hubris as to attack an unknown force—Glenn and Abraham would be alive right now. Of course Negan would still kill them later, presumably, but at least we’d have the satisfaction—rather, we would not have the dissatisfaction of feeling Rick is, yet again, a bad, bad, often crazy leader. It detracts from Negan’s character too, because in a sense he was justified in punishing Rick’s group because they murdered a bunch of his guys first and without provocation.
Rick’s gone back and forth between being a good leader and a bad leader (with forays into both “good but crazy leader” and “bad and crazy leader”
that it’s getting hard to root for him. Sure, he may eventually get his shit together and lead the group with some degree of intelligence and something approaching humanity, but we’ve seen him fall apart too many times to ever really believe in him. And the fact that he keeps edging closer and closer to becoming one of the “villains” he keeps facing makes it harder and harder to root for him.
So! That there was also an episode that was somehow wrapped around the disappointing answer to pop culture’s biggest question is almost besides the point. The only thing that mattered was who Negan killed, and even then the show didn’t have the decency to just answer it right away. It began after the murder, without showing the victim(s), and then with Negan leading Rick away for a heart-to-heart in the RV. This is followed by Rick having montage after montage of all of the possible victims, the show trying to wring the last, tiniest drops of dramatic tension from the moment. It was instead annoying, and we didn’t see the actual death(s) scene until mid-way through.
Full review.
