[Warning: If you’re not caught up with The Walking Dead, minor spoilers follow.]
Following Sunday night’s mid-season finale of The Walking Dead, AMC aired a back-half promo that hinted at the proper introduction of one of the saga’s biggest, most-anticipated baddies. The two-minute spot (above) features Daryl, Abraham, and Sasha stumbling upon a road block of a biker gang. “Your weapons, your truck, the fuel in your truck — if you got mints in your glove compartment, porn underneath the seat, change in the seats, hell, the seats themselves, the floor mats, your maps, stash of emergency napkins you got there in the console — none of those things are yours anymore,†one of the bikers says. “Your property now belongs to Negan.â€
The threatening guy with the dead eyes is referring to an oppressive leader who appears late in TWD comics with a barbed-wire baseball bat and an unfortunate run-in with Glenn. As he is in the comics, Negan “is going to be thrown in at some point in the future that’s just going to fundamentally change everything that we are doing,†creator Robert Kirkman said on this week’s Talking Dead, according to Variety. Jeffrey Dean Morgan has been cast as the villainous character, and should pop up near the end of the current season. The show comes back for what’s promised to be a deadly second-half return on February 14 — just in time for a very intense Valentine’s Day date or distraction.