Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Negan
Tonight will be the Season Finale of The Walking Dead, Season 7. It will end the show’s most controversial season to date, and hopefully wrap up many loose ends (unlike last season’s convoluted cliffhanger). Tonight we should know if Negan makes it to Season 8, if Rick and company will begin their long brewing war against the Saviors, if Eugene has actually turned genuine traitor or will make a surprise heroic stand, and whether Sasha will survive or become zombified in order to go off and join The Enterprise.
Mostly, however, this season has been controversial due to the introduction of the most polarizing villain the show has yet produced-the terrifying and yet strangely likeable Negan, played (and occasionally overplayed) to the charismatic hilt by Jeffrey Dean Morgan. The fact that with Season 7, we have seen Negan and his trusty sidekick Lucille become the new poster boy face of The Walking Dead, supplanting the image of Rick Grimes riding horseback into a devastated Atlanta or even Daryl and his crossbow, speaks volumes about our complicated love/hate relationships with characters we know we aren’t supposed to root for-but yet sometimes do, in spite of ourselves.
In my annual excursions to Walker Stalker.con, I have noticed an interesting phenomenon. The fan lines that snake around every celebrity table are always just as long-if not longer-for “bad guys” like The Governor, Merle Dixon and Shane Walsh as for our “heroes” Rick, Daryl, Carol, Glen, Maggie, etc.
Not that this is anything new, of course. Indeed, the love/hate relationship that we have with villains, anti-heroes, and antagonists can be traced back to the classical theater of the ancient Greeks. In the centuries since, such infamous names from Doctor Faustus to Shakespeare’s Iago, from real life and cinematic anti-heroes like Billy the Kid and Bonnie and Clyde to Pulp Fiction’s Jules and Vincent, from “Mickey and Mallory” of Natural Born Killers to Tony Soprano, have captured our imaginations even as we rooted for their downfall or comeuppance-and, in some cases, felt guilty satisfaction in the possibility that they just might come out on top. And in the world of The Walking Dead, at least, many of the show’s “bad guys” (and “bad gals”) either redeemed themselves in the end, or at least provided enough glimpse into their human tribulations to make us understand the arc their characters took. We knew that Shane was eaten up with guilt over having fallen in love with his best friend’s wife. We knew that The Governor of Woodbury had lost his wife and daughter. No matter how evil we may have thought The Governor was, only the most stone hearted could have continued to completely despise the man after realizing he was keeping his little girl’s animated corpse hidden in a closet in a pathetic attempt to hold on to the only thing he had ever loved. And later, many of us would actually find ourselves rooting for him as he fought through a zombie infested nursing facility to get the much needed oxygen tanks to help a little girl’s grandfather who was dying with lung cancer. Yes, The Governor did end up killing Herschel in a rash moment, but not before he had proven to us that at least there was a heart beating somewhere behind the eye patch and perpetual sneer.
And, in the rare cases when a bad guy had no such redeeming qualities, such as Terminus’s head cannibal Gareth (certainly one of the more under developed villains of the series) they were quickly dispensed with.
With Negan has come no such humanizing moments, at least not yet. I write this, of course, with the full knowledge that his character arc on the show has yet to be completed, and from all indications-including the comic source material-he still has a long way to go. Perhaps at some point we will get some clues as to how a normal guy might have evolved into the power hungry, post-apocalyptic dictator and monster he has become, but that’s a story that The Walking Dead has yet to tell. Suffice to say that right now, he simply seems like Satan incarnate. And yet, for all that he has brutally murdered beloved cast characters and is making current life in the apocalypse even more of a living hell for those that have survived, I can’t say I completely hate him. In fact, I eagerly look forward to his appearances. In a season that has for the most part dragged disappointingly with one bottleneck episode after another (yes, I know we are building to the big, epic battle, but how many seasons is it going to take to get there!) Negan’s few appearances have been the only thing providing the dramatic tension that this show used to excel at, week after week. This is thanks in no small measure to Jeffrey Dean Morgan, who manages to make this most unlikable and unsympathetic of characters into the kind of semi-comic, over the top villain that Quentin Tarantino would take pride in. I haven’t yet felt an ounce of empathy for Negan, but he does manage in his own dark and twisted way to make me laugh sometimes in spite of myself-and, admittedly, in spite of the horrible things I know he has done. Consider the absolutely, deliciously wicked way in which he disposed of one of the show’s lamest characters, the ever whining and spoiled brat Spencer whose attempt to betray Rick by sidling up to Negan ended with a literal spilling of guts.
Certainly Negan is brutal, sadistic, and no doubt mentally twisted. But one thing that he and his group The Saviors have managed to do-in a way that the short-lived Terminus cannibals or the under developed Wolves simply could not-is to bring back some much needed adrenaline to the show. In the first few seasons, that adrenaline rush was provided by the conflict of a small group of living humans pitted against hordes of flesh-eating zombies. And, of course, in the occasional lulls between dodging zombie herds, we had the ever present soap opera of the characters’ internal dramas to move things forward. In the early days, the soap opera element was nevertheless good soap opera, largely because we were invested enough in the characters to actually care almost as much about their personal dramas as their fight for survival. Somehow, it just seemed easier then. It was because we cared about both Rick and Shane that we wanted to see a peaceful resolve to their conflict; we rooted for Carol’s emancipation when her abusive husband Ed was killed, finally setting her free. We cheered for Glen when he finally grew a pair and stopped being the group’s patsy. We grieved with Daryl when he found his brother Merle as a walker and had to kill him; we cried collectively when we lost our moral compasses Dale and Herschel, and “The Grove” to this day is still an episode I can barely watch. I could go on and on, obviously. But somewhere between Seasons 3 and 4 something changed. Part of that change, of course, was a change in writers with the departure of Frank Darabont and the arrival of Scott Gimple, who lately has put much more emphasis on a faithful following of the comics. But it’s more at stake than that. With that change has come a noticeable change in the show’s pacing. Whereas in earlier seasons, the show seemed quite comfortably adept at juggling multiple storylines, that capability seems to have diminished considerably in recent seasons. Partly, perhaps, this has been an inevitable result of having too many characters with too many stories to take up screen time. In the early days, we had a core group who had come together for the purpose of survival. Now that core group has expanded to include no less than seven communities, with the weekly storylines being divided accordingly among them. To add to the ever increasing disparateness, even our core group is now split and scattered among these various communities.
Since I keep up with all of the various online fan discussions of the show, I know I am not alone in this assessment. The show had always been at its best when we had our core group at their scrappiest, forced to survive the elements, walkers-and occasionally, each other. The show’s power was in its self containment of that world. And I don’t think it’s a far stretch to say that something was lost the minute the group got to Alexandria and became just a little too comfortable; a tad too settled. For fans of this show, it has always been the ultimate catch-22. Even as we root for their survival and happily-ever-after ending, we also know that once that goal is achieved, the show is over. Inevitably, as the weeks in Alexandria dragged by and the massive walls kept the walkers at bay, the drama invariably turned inward, becoming little more than a soap opera of internal and political conflicts between Rick’s group and the Alexandrians. Additionally, the introduction to Alexandria upset the show’s core balance, as we were suddenly introduced to a whole new cast of characters that we were suddenly expected to care about. Obviously, a show that goes on for seven seasons must, at some point, introduce new characters. In the world of this show, especially, where characters are routinely killed off, it’s a necessity for ensuring survival. Imagine if Rick’s group had never stumbled upon Herschel’s farm and met the Greens!
But with the arrival at Alexandria, it became a bit of overload. And that overload has only increased in recent months, with the introduction of the Saviors, the Hilltop, the Kingdom, Oceanside, The Garbage Dump group and others. It’s not so much, perhaps, the influx of new characters that has upset the balance as much as the fact that most of them (with a few exceptions such as King Ezekiel) have simply not been that interesting. What’s more, something that began as an occasional trend in Season 4 has now become frustratingly par for the course-the bottleneck episode. Fans have been complaining about the prevalence of these for the entire season, but since it doesn’t look like it’s a trend that is going to go away anytime soon, fans have had to adapt to the idea that every plot development from now on is going to be doled out like chapters in a novel. While the world of the characters has expanded, the show’s pacing has been uneven at best in its ability to keep up with that expansion. Perhaps Rick’s group would have been better off had they simply stayed in Georgia, where it seems at least for now that Negan’s reign of terror hasn’t reached. But then, how many seasons can be eked out of living in prisons and forests and every so often stumbling across an abandoned farm house for shelter?
True to Scott Gimple’s promise, the introduction of Negan has taken the show down a much darker path, one where we are no longer as certain who the “good guys” and “bad guys” actually are (for sure, Rick has just as often drunk from that same poison well as Negan; consider how ruthlessly and arrogantly he executed a plan to murder the Saviors in cold blood, long before they had enacted any violence upon him), and indeed where all former certainties have been wiped clean. The introduction of Negan, like the arrival of Rick’s group into Alexandria, has shifted the core balance of the show, but in a way that (arguably) needed to be done. For starters, he has been responsible for giving Rick a much needed character arc by knocking him off the egotistical high horse he has been riding now for several seasons, and bringing him crashing back down to earth with some much needed humility. Granted, it was fascinating to watch Rick evolve from the mostly decent, moral Atlanta sheriff to the near neanderthal capable of biting a man’s throat out, but as the show’s longevity continued, that characterization had grown thin-even a bit wearisome and predictable. It was cringe-worthy for me to watch Rick so arrogantly taking over Alexandria, as well as attempting to lord it over all the surrounding communities as they were discovered-communities that were all clearly more advanced than any his group had ever been able to sustain.
For all those who complained and whined about the gory violence of the Season 7 opener, let’s keep one thing in perspective: Yes, seeing Abraham and Glen getting their brains bashed out was brutal; it was ugly. But it was also exactly what was needed to shock Rick-and us-out of our smug apathy (as well as sense of false security). This was the jolt needed to remind us that the post apocalyptic world these characters inhabit is not supposed to be a snug soap opera that we wrap ourselves in every Sunday night like a warm, fuzzy, familiar blanket. This was the reminder we needed that, despite the fortress provided by Alexandria’s walls, this is still a brutally dangerous world where all the former rules of decency and morality no longer apply. Now that the immediate danger of flesh eating walkers seems at least somewhat under control, and the few surviving humans have begun to erect small communities, we are basically seeing a return of the feudal system that dominated much of the Middle Ages in the aftermath of war and plague. If history is any lesson, we know it will take many decades-perhaps even centuries-for these small, sprawling communities to become like anything even remotely resembling the modern civilization we know. (Interestingly, it also serves to remind us of how much more advanced we could be if history, time and again, had not knocked us flat on our asses). But my point is that we already know from history how bloody and violent things got before any progress was made. Let’s just say that all of those who found it so upsetting to see a couple of characters’ heads bashed in would certainly have never survived the bloody horrors that our ancestors endured in the days of the feudal wars.
The brutal killings were shocking, but they also provided a much needed reset for both Rick and the group; a reminder both to them and to us that they are only one group of players in a vast drama that is being enacted all over the world. For at least six seasons, we have witnessed them as the star performers and key players of that drama. But with the introduction of the Saviors, we now know that not only are there many other groups out there, but that some of them, at least, are far more advanced, far more powerful in number, and far more ruthless in their tactics for survival. In Negan, Rick has more than met his match, and however this latest conflict plays out, we know it’s not going to go down with the same swift and predictable assuredness of The Governor or Terminus. And victory-if it comes-will most assuredly come with heavy sacrifices; sacrifices that will again force a reset for Rick and company as they move forward.
As even the ancient dramatists knew, no drama can survive long without some form of catharsis. In the world of television, where we like to grow fuzzy and comfortable with the characters and storylines we love, these cathartic changes are never pleasant. But they are necessary for the long term health and survival of the show. Without catharsis, things simply grow stale and protracted, or as one fan so aptly stated, “Apply. Rinse. Repeat.”
In this season, we have had the almighty and arrogant Rick brought to his knees, shaking in fear; we’ve seen him subjucated to being nothing more than Negan’s bitch. In turn, this finally led him to some much needed moral humility. We saw familiar characters brutally slain; we saw Daryl reduced from being The Walking Dead poster boy to a tortured prisoner; we’ve seen Maggie, now freed from making goo-goo eyes with Glen, coming into her own as leader of The Hilltop. While none of these changes have been exactly pleasant to witness, they nevertheless have provided these characters with fresh arcs and much needed development.
But perhaps the biggest test of Negan’s importance to the show has been the Sunday Night Supper Challenge. In our household-and I am sure we are not alone in this-it has become something of a Sunday night ritual to plan the evening meal around The Walking Dead. But for many seasons, it was often a challenge for me to be able to down a meal-and keep it down-while watching this show. That was always the surest way to tell if an episode of The Walking Dead was accomplishing what it was supposed to accomplish. If I was so tense and anxious about what was happening onscreen-and who was going to be killed next-that I couldn’t stomach any food, that was a sure sign of investment in that night’s episode. Let’s just say that I knew things weren’t going so well when I realized I was getting a little too comfortable with being able to watch The Walking Dead and eat Sunday night dinner at the same time.
This season, Negan has brought that feeling back. Both the Season 6 cliffhanger and Season 7 premier were two of the most psychologically chilling episodes I have ever witnessed in television history.
Like most viewers, part of me was wondering why Rick, Glen, Daryl, and Abraham didn’t just rise up and fight their way out of it like they always do. But when you watch those episodes and witness the chillingly charismatic and effortless manner in which Negan exercises his particular brand of mind control, it is fascinating to watch-and terrifying. And we understand in that moment how the group was rendered powerless under his spell. This was vicarious, psychological terror at its finest, a pinnacle that took The Walking Dead seven years to reach and which it may well never reach again. From that point forward, I have literally cringed in fear every time Negan has been so much as in the same frame as one of our characters. In the episode where Carl was forced to sing for him as Negan stood only a few feet behind, menacingly swinging Lucille, my stomach was twisted in knots. That’s not a pleasant feeling, but just like the sickening adrenaline rush that compels us to hop on board the world’s scariest rollercoasters or to pack threatres for the latest Friday the 13th, it’s both intoxicating and addictive-in the best kind of way.
Negan is hateful, sadistic, psychotic, and just about every twisted adjective you can think of. But he has also been the kick in the pants that this show has desperately needed since Season 3. He makes me cringe; he makes me angry as hell, and sometimes, in the most twisted black humor kind of way, he even makes me laugh. With the sacrificial blood of Glen and Abraham, he has given the show the new life it so desperately needed.
Are Negan’s own days numbered? Well, if the comics are any indication, he’s here for the long haul. But I have little doubt that, eventually, Rick will conquer him. After all, Rick is our protagonist, and just like the best of all Shakespearean drama, the purpose of catharsis is to restore balance.
But I think any fan who says they will not mourn Negan’s passing is lying to themselves. For sure, it will be satisfying to see him get his comeuppance, but what then? If this show is to survive, it’s always going to need a villain, a nemesis of some sort. And Negan, for sure, is going to be one tough act to follow.
In fact, he just may prove irreplaceable.