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Over the months since the season 6 finale aired, this Negan cliffhanger has transformed into an albatross around the show's neck. If you're feeling allegorical, you could even draw out some of the parallels between Rick and the biblical Abraham, who nearly sacrificed his son Isaac on God's orders until God intervened at the last second and told him it was only a test.īut until The Walking Dead seems like it wants to be engaged with on that level, it doesn’t really seem worth the effort. And while our heroes are more or less mired in the same state of collective shock, Maggie needs to be dragged away from a solo suicide mission fueled only by her grief, which sets up a potentially interesting character arc. Negan is clearly keeping Rick alive for a reason-either because he thinks seeing a broken Rick will keep the rest of his friends in line, or because he actually believes Rick can be converted into a productive ally. There are some intriguing threads buried in the episode, if you're willing to do most of the heavy lifting. Were we supposed to be excited about the prospect of watching one of the show's most likable characters get beaten to death by a baseball bat covered in barbed wire? If so, The Walking Dead certainly goes out of its way to rub our noses in our collective enthusiasm for the bloodsport it created.įor a show that just killed off two major characters, this was a brief, by-the-numbers episode that told us absolutely nothing new about our heroes or our villains, and set no clear arc to build anticipation for the rest of the season.

And the promo campaign for the seventh season did the TV show no favors with the obnoxious, relentless hype for Negan and his signature baseball bat, which treated a character's death like the title bout of a boxing match. (At the very least, The Walking Dead could have ended its sixth season by clearly depicting the death of Abraham, which would have been significantly less anticlimactic and might have tricked fans into believing that Glenn was safe after all.) The baseball-bat executions-which, due to an inexplicable story structure, don't actually begin until 20 minutes into the episode-are extraordinarily grotesque but also kind of what you've been expecting, since Glenn's death is basically a shot-for-shot adaptation of a thing that happened in the comics in 2012. The mistakes begin with the long-awaited solution to the cliffhanger, which seems even more misguided now that the solution has been revealed. Part of the problem with the premiere is structural.