'The Walking Dead' Recap: As Long as It's All of Us, We Can Do Anything

SPOILER ALERT: The recap for the “Last Day on Earth" episode of The Walking Dead, contains storyline and character spoilers.

The good news, if you’re in the mood to consider it after the most intense, stressful, cliffhangery episode of The Walking Dead yet: we can’t name a single member of Rick Grimes’s group who died in the Season 6 finale.

But… that’s only because the victim of the group’s first showdown with The Saviors’ vicious leader, Negan, was off camera; the audience saw Lucille smash down on his or her head, and heard the sickening sounds of a barbed wire-covered baseball bat splitting apart that noggin like a melon being crushed with a sledgehammer. But the death was shown from the victim’s point of view.

Yes, really, we won’t know who Negan killed until Season 7 premieres, most likely next October. Six months from now. It’s a particularly frustrating end given how much time and effort the episode spent building up a story that found Rick and his group meeting a demented funhouse of roadblocks as they tried to get ailing Maggie to The Hilltop to see the doctor. The Saviors were onto them at every turn, jamming up the RV full of Alexandrians with cars and gun-toting members, a red rover-like lineup of chained together walkers (including a couple that sported pieces of Michonne’s hair and one of Daryl’s arrows), and a wall of fire.

Related: ‘Walking Dead’: Why Negan’s Arrival Was a Triumph and a Disaster

The maddening realization that The Saviors were in charge all along, that they were manipulating Rick’s group into a final standoff that was rife with horror movie dread, was palpable, growing throughout the finale and creating a viewing experience where you had to remind yourself to breathe.

The cliffhanger, then, while a clever storytelling twist — we know whodunit, just not who it was done to — taunted viewers with the same maddening realization that Negan foisted upon Rick: “Sucks, don’t it… the moment you realize you don’t know shit?”

Those are not the only takeaways from what was an incredibly emotional episode, directed brilliantly by TWD executive producer and special effects whiz Greg Nicotero.

Negan’s Debut Did Not Disappoint

Not that there was much — any? — dissent among fans about the casting of Jeffrey Dean Morgan as the much anticipated Negan, but, pun intended, JDM really killed in Negan’s debut. Charming, funny, brutal, intimidating… Morgan’s Negan was all of those things, and the way he fills out Negan’s signature leather jacket isn’t hurting his portrayal of the vicious but charismatic killer. It’s going to be impossible to hate Negan without liking him a little, too. Fans had wondered how the series would deal with Negan’s love of the F-bomb and the rest of his expletive-filled vocabulary, but it was only after the episode that we noticed he hadn’t used his favorite word at all. Still, Morgan’s delivery of “Pee Pee Pants City” — Negan’s prediction of where his terrified potential victims were going to soon visit — did more to tease the character’s personality than a dozen instances of the ultimate four-letter word would have.

Carol and Morgan

A highlight of the entire season has been watching Melissa McBride and Lennie James’s powerful scenes together, as their Carol and Morgan were at opposite ends with their perspectives on killing the living in the apocalypse. That they’ve come to share the same philosophy, but are still far apart on how to deal with their desire to not kill anymore, continues to play out as great moments between two great actors. When Morgan finally catches up to Carol in the finale, she’s injured and dejected, and he tries to convince her that she has to return to Alexandria because she loves and is loved, while she argues that’s the very reason she left — caring means she can’t stop killing to protect her loved ones. Carol’s so distraught about the philosophical box she’s put herself into that when she runs away from Morgan and into the vengeful Savior who was the only survivor among the truck full of people Carol wiped out in “East,” she laughs when he begins his plan to shoot her in various non-lethal spots until she slowly and painfully dies. Morgan, on the horse he found, rides in just in time to save her from the Savior and herself, while a pair of men, with another horse, arrive on the scene just after Morgan had to break his own no-kill policy and shoot the Savior.

How will Morgan deal with breaking his assertion that all life is precious? Will it rattle Carol enough to make her abandon her plan to abandon her friends? And about those dudes with the horse…

The Kingdom’s Debut?

The man who ran away from Morgan and Rick at the walker-infested barn in “East” — the man who Morgan saved when he pushed Rick and made sure his shot didn’t hit the runner — is one of the men in DIY armor who show up just after Morgan kills the Savior. He’s with another man in armor-ish gear, and a horse, and they appear to be friendly, with the man from the barn sticking out his hand to shake Morgan’s and offering to help Carol. They also appear to have a lot in common with a group of survivors from the comics, who live at The Kingdom, an old high school surrounded by school busses, and are led by a George Clinton lookalike known as Ezekiel. Without getting too spoilery, in the comics, Ezekiel and The Kingdom play a big role in how Alexandria and The Hilltop deal with Negan and the Saviors.

Eugene the Hero

After being sent hither and yon for most of the episode, it’s Eugene, he of the now-ponytailed Tennessee tophat, who comes up with the best plan (successful though it ultimately isn’t) to deal with The Saviors’ runaround. Given the obvious depth of The Saviors’ bench, and their “big ass toys and capability,” Eugene says his group is making it easy for The Saviors to track them by riding around in the RV, the “rust bucket.” So Eugene volunteers to cruise around in the RV solo, while the rest of the gang carries Maggie on a stretcher through the woods and to The Hilltop. It’s a brave move on the part of the man who was not so long ago one of the least ready and willing Alexandrians. It’s almost certainly a suicide mission, and after Eugene shares his bullet recipe with Rick and hugs (hugs!) a reverential Abraham, the episode went to commercial break with probably most of us assuming we had just watched Eugene’s final scene. Happily that wasn’t the case — though he still may turn out to be Negan’s victim.

Abraham: the Pancake Maker?

Even as the drama ramped up to a point where the Alexandrians in the RV found themselves “neck-deep up Shit Creek with our mouths wide open,” as Abraham put it, Mr. Ford was keeping his vow to make some plans for the future, before he meets the cosmic Pete. And some very big plans they are: he asks Sasha if she wants to join Maggie and Glenn in trying to repopulate the new world. It’s a sweet moment, Abe-style, but it also makes us more afraid that Abraham’s desire to, ahem, drop some Bisquick batter, means he’s the one who got way too up close to Lucille.

The Alexandrians Left Behind, i.e. What’s Next?

Father Gabriel and Spencer are left behind at Alexandria, to defend the town and, for Gabriel, to protect Judith. Clearly, though, given how thrown Rick and the others were by The Saviors’ plan to round them up for that deadly showdown, no one at Alexandria can possibly be truly prepared for what might be showing up at the front gate. Will The Saviors head to Alexandria in the aftermath of what Negan has just done to… you-don’t-know-who? Will Negan simply let the survivors of Camp Hell go after he’s done swinging Lucille?

More questions for the Season 7 premiere: Rick and the group were just a few miles away from The Hilltop, which they indicated when assuring Maggie they would get her there soon to be treated by a doctor; that means Jesus is nearby, too. Might he play a role in the survivors of the Negan attack making it back to Alexandria?

And, having spent all that time and effort building up this incredibly powerful final scene with Negan, how will the series reveal who was killed in the Season 7 opener? Will we jump forward in time to see how the others are dealing with the loss? Will we simply pick up right where we left off, with our own point of view look at who’s head provided a landing for Lucille? Is it possible we’ve already felt most of the emotional weight of the killing, without even knowing who died yet? And if the creators and cast of The Walking Dead can manage to get us back to the same stage of fear and heartbreak we were in for the season finale’s final scene, will all be forgiven for making us wait six months for the payoff we all both desperately want and dread at the same time?

Zombie Bites:

* Who it isn’t: when Negan tells the lineup of potential victims not to say anything during the murder — they can blink, they can cry, they can breathe, but no talking or yelling — he instructs his minions that if someone does talk, the minions should cut out Carl’s eye and feed it to Rick. Colorful, yes, but it also probably means neither of the Grimes fellas are being smashed to pieces if they’re intact enough for the eye snack threat, right?

* The complete list of potential Lucille targets, so we can continue the “who dies/died” debates through October: Rick, Carl, Abraham, Aaron, Sasha, Eugene, and Maggie from the RV, and Glenn, Daryl, Michonne, and Rosita, who were being held by Dwight and his crew in a van, but were reunited with the rest of the Alexandrians at the Negan showdown.

* Poll: What was more effective in its creepiness – The Saviors’ whistling; Negan’s game of Eeenie, Meenie, Miney, Moe; the red rover lineup of walkers walker who was sporting one of Michonne’s dreadlocks; or your own realization that Rick’s statement that “As long as it’s all of us, we can do anything” was going to be proven tragically false?

* Do we believe the cast doesn’t even know who died in the season finale?

* Enid begged Carl to allow her to go along with the RV crew, because she’s gotten very close to Maggie since returning to Alexandria with Glenn. Carl refused, and locked her in a closet to make sure she didn’t go, using her own words against her — “just survive somehow” — when she asked him what would happen if the RV group doesn’t return. Harsh, Carl.

O.K., Dead-heads, let’s hear your reactions to “Last Day on Earth”: Who was on the receiving end of Negan’s Lucille attack? Will Morgan and Carol make it back to Alexandria alive? If Maggie is still alive, will her baby make it through this Negan drama? If Abraham isn’t Negan’s target, will he and Sasha mimic Maggie and Glenn’s efforts to bring new life into the new world? And, thumbs up or thumbs down on this season-ending cliffhanger?