'Walking Dead': Why Negan's Arrival Was a Triumph and a Disaster
What, you expected something other than what you got from The Walking Dead’s season finale on Sunday night? If you did, you’re as foolish as a walker strolling toward Michonne’s gleaming blade.
Warning: Spoilers ahead for the Season 6 finale episode of The Walking Dead.
Jeffrey Dean Morgan shape-shifted over from another 9 p.m. Sunday-night series, The Good Wife, with the same cute beard, the same crinkly eyes, the same slim-jim tight jeans, and the same sly smile — except here in his new AMC neighborhood, his spin-off series would probably be called The Dead Wife, and his barbed-wire bat Lucille would have done the killing.
As it was, Morgan got to deliver a long, excruciatingly suspenseful speech about his rules (“You give me your s—“), his disappointment with Rick and his humbled gang (“You killed a lot of my people”), the need for cruel punishment, and a certain narrowing of their life options: “You can breathe, you can blink, you can cry” is not a motto I’d like to have to abide by.
The episode was thoroughly in keeping with The Walking Dead as it has continued to shamble across the TV landscape: lotsa talk, lotsa zombie-killing, lotsa setting-up of situations and potential human deaths that take forever to actually play out. In this case, the internet exploded Sunday night in an eruption of hurt fan feelings that the producers failed to disclose who was on the receiving end of Negan’s Lucille-bashing before the season fade-out.
Related: ‘The Walking Dead’ Recap: As Long as It’s All of Us, We Can Do Anything
After Glenn’s non-death earlier in the season, did you really think we were going to get some satisfaction? (And here I have to emphasize that for this show, “satisfaction” would have meant seeing a major character beaten to a bloody pulp, personally not my idea of fun.) The Walking Dead has been, since its premiere, a show that’s all about withholding from the audience. The only suspense in the entire series is this: Who is going to die, and when?
Given these meager, sadistic stakes, one searched the TV screen for tiny items of interest for sustenance. For example, I was struck by how dazed and defeated Rick seemed from the very moment he saw the massive forces of Saviors now arrayed against him and his team. He barely mustered the strength and guts to be upset when it very briefly looked as though his son might be on Lucille’s receiving end. And while Glenn’s caterwauling at the prospect of his beloved Maggie being bashed set him up to be the perfect victim for Negan to silence… nope, sorry, from Negan’s point of view, that would have been too easy to do at that particular moment. Which is not to say it wasn’t Glenn who was ultimately smashed to bits in the episode’s closing seconds.
What this cliffhanger really amounted to was Negan using Lucille to hit the home viewer in the head with a clarifying blow. “Wake up!” seemed to be the message. “You’re being played for a sucker!” Bam! “How much longer are you going to put up with this slow pacing?” Pow! “With our teasing?” Crrrrack!
I’d say the show did a great job of introducing a new, long-awaited character, and that I’m looking forward to more Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Negan, but one of the things that really means is that his entrance into The Walking Dead instantly erased the increasingly dim, exhausted characterizations and performances of Andrew Lincoln, Lauren Cohan, Steven Yeun and most of the rest. So how can that be counted as an achievement for the series?
