Spoiler alert: Here’s where we make the requisite statement that the following post contains major spoilers for the season-six finale of The Walking Dead. Please proceed with caution, as though you were tracking Carol in the woods.
As promised, Jeffrey Dean Morgan made his appearance as Negan, the bat-wielding psychopath with a twisted honor code during the season-six finale of The Walking Dead. Rick rounded up most of the group and took the RV to try and get Maggie to the OB/GYN at the Hilltop Colony, but every way he goes, he gets stymied by a Savior-sponsored roadblock, including one twisted Red Rover. Ultimately, Negan’s operation is too powerful to overcome, and he rounds up most of our major characters — save Morgan and Carol — to kneel in front of him as he decides which one of them to kill.
Will Carol come back to the group?
At the end of the last episode, Carol had set on her way with Morgan tracking her. Eventually he catches up to an injured and willful Carol, who refuses to return with him to Alexandria. By her logic, if you’re around people you care about, you’re going to have to kill for them. But she’s doing a lot of killing either way! So this seems like pretty faulty reasoning. Anyway, at the end, Carol is tortured by one of Negan’s Saviors who was left alive after a group of them attacked her. His plan is to kill her slowly, by shooting her once in the arm and then in the leg. But before he goes in for the kill shot, the peace-loving Morgan steps in and kills him, ultimately proving Carol right: If you care about people, you’ll inevitably have to kill for them.
Hear ye, hear ye! The Kingdom is coming.
Who was the guy wearing body armor like a knight? Comics readers will astutely recognize that he was likely a representative of the Kingdom, another colony in the ever-widening world of The Walking Dead.
Negan has a really slick operation.
The bulk of the finale was spent with Rick and the group trying to find a route to the Hilltop. Instead, they were blocked at every turn by Negan’s men, who looked like a righteously angry Men’s Rights Association. They also had what Eugene correctly identified as some “big-ass machines†that would allow them to completely block a road with freshly cut trees. Whatever is coming in season seven, it’s clear that Negan has an enormous operation we’ve only seen a fraction of.
So … who died?
Well, the expected death of a major character took place, but we’re going to have to wait until the season-seven premiere to find out who it was. (This is confirmed during The Talking Dead, where we just had a title card that wondered the identity of Negan’s victim during the “In Memoriam†segment.) In his finale appearance, Negan engaged in a messed-up little game of “Eeny, meeny, miney, moe†and took his bat to someone’s brain. Does this blunt (ha-ha) the emotional impact of the death of a major character? Or does it provide for a riveting cliffhanger? Either way, let the speculation games begin.