It has been almost exactly five years since the day Jeffrey Dean Morgan made his first appearance as Negan in Living Dead. Despite all the criticism that the first episodes with Negan and the Saviors received later, there was always something convincing about Morgan’s depiction of the character. Even with all the bullshit “shitting in his pants” that regularly overwhelmed him, the actor managed to take the evil villain and imbue him with charisma, charm and threat in equal measure, making it very easy to understand why he was the type of person that others would follow without question. He was not identifiable, but it made sense; the intensified camp elements of Morgan’s performance were an integral part of the character, a way of deftly describing the fact that everything Negan did at that time was, in a sense, a performance. He knew he was putting on a show, and what helped to make him magnetic was the fact that the viewer was never sure who Negan was under all that slippery bravado.
And now, half a decade later, we’re finally revealing the backstory to one of the few characters that continues to hold Living Dead interesting in its final seasons. “Here is Negan” makes sense as the final installment of these 10th season bonus episodes, not only because it is the best in the group, but because it effectively closes the first episode centered on Maggie, closing the circle of their stories. Maggie she went back to her old life because maybe it’s the only place left that feels like home to her. And when she arrives, the man who murdered her husband is standing right there, free and clean. Negan returns to Alexandria at the end of this hour, not because it is the only place that feels like home, but because there is no home; “Home” as a concept ended when Lucille died. What this place means to him, in my reading of that final look he gives Carol and Maggie, is destiny. If Maggie kills him in the middle of the night, well, he’s fine with that. He deserves. But he gave what remains of his time on earth to this community, to the idea of making peace – for the “better way” that Carl insisted it could exist here. Negan likes that idea. Even if it kills you.
But before that, we have the condensed history of Negan. It is very different from Here is the negan comic book miniseries by Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard and Cliff Rathburn. Except for Lucille’s cancer, almost everything else has been reviewed, from Negan’s affair with Lucille’s sister to the story of the nested doll. It is still not ideal to continue playing all these dates to the viewer in quick succession (1 year earlier, six weeks earlier, seven months earlier, et. Al), but it works better than in Daryl flashback episode, thanks in large part to the way in which each one is based on the previous one: From the present day, we go to Negan tied up, being interrogated by a pair of bikers, telling them the story of how he found the doctor and his daughter and took the medicine to continue his wife’s chemotherapy. From there, we moved on to her meeting with that doctor, where he tells the story of Lucille’s treatment six weeks earlier, husband and wife surviving at home in an abandoned city while she was battling cancer. But when the energy runs out, ruining the remaining supply of medicine, he prepares to ask for help – which is when she makes Negan sit and we get other story within another story, this time from Lucille’s point of view, knowing about Negan’s case while making the diagnosis. From there, it is the return, through each level of the narrative, stories within the stories being pulled back until we are again in the present day.
G / O Media can receive a commission
As dizzying as we can get, it works very well, thanks in large part to the performances of Morgan and his real-life spouse, Burton. ONEctors playing couples with their real loved ones can be a real success or failure, but here are aces, with a touching and lived relationship where easy chemistry goes a long way to selling some of the most implausible things (like Lucille’s abrupt choice to put aside the fact that her husband is sleeping with her sister). The moments of levity are as strong as the most painful, and while I think there was some absurdity in the fall of the “You Are So Beautiful” needle after Lucille turned into a bedridden zombie, snapping his teeth at Negan, he was also quite powerful before and after, establishing the intensity of his bond and the way she dies left him untethered to the world, capable of … well, almost everything, as he admits to the bikers who tied him up before. Killing some men for the first time in your life, you see the vaguely distant look in his eyes like Negan he realizes that there are no consequences, no worldly structure to judge. There is only his inner voice of compassion, one that he thought died with Lucille.
But when his bat splits in half after he digs it up, he realizes not only the folly of investing his dead wife’s spirit in the inanimate object, but the falsehood to think that your already mentioned compassion had died with her. The reason he will find the bat in the first place is not to somehow make peace with things, as they are as much as an acceptance that his pain will always be with him. “You are nothing without her,” his view of the cruel old Negan tells him, and it’s true – just not necessarily the way old Negan could have thought. The bat, thrown in the fire, is the symbol accept the fact that cheating Married Negan, sadistic Salvador Negan and penitent Negan today are no different men; they are intermediate stations that disappear in the background of his memory of who he was with Lucille during those final months. Your old self was worried about getting used to killing walkers, but the current Negan realized the harsh truth: that you can get used to anything.
Anything but the loss of the person who kept him connected to this world. “Here is Negan” is, ultimately, a tale of loss and regret, and how these emotions can spin us violently or humanly, just the opposite sides of the same coin as our inability to cope. tragedy. Rick, Carl and the best of our group have always transformed these feelings of loss into a determination to avoid that loss for others – they have found meaning in giving themselves up to serve as a bulwark against pain for those around them. Negan, with his wry and tolerant smile towards Maggie, found a similar meaning, but without any sense of self-preservation. “The bad news is that I also have a few things to get off my chest this time,” he said to the biker, before hitting his head. But now, he took it all off his chest. There is nothing else to cling to. There is only destiny.
Stronemy observations
- Did that leather jacket cost $ 600? Jesus, if I were Lucille, I would be upset about this account even though my husband was still a gym teacher.
- Lucille was a fan of the James Bond films.
- I take my hat off for the movement of introducing Negan’s eventual lieutenant as the doctor’s daughter, thus linking some points between the beginning of his new life and the rise of the Salvadorans.
- There are some monologues in this episode, but for my money, the best was Negan telling the biker about getting into the fight with the guy who wouldn’t let Lucille hear his music on the jukebox.
- Carol: “I didn’t want your death on my conscience. And now it is not. ”
- Another nice touch: show how there were glimpses of the future villain Negan inside him during normal times, just channeled to play video games online.
- Thanks to everyone for joining me to watch and discuss these 10th season bonus episodes. See you back here later this year, to the beginning of the end.