Living Dead left the best of his 10th season bonus episodes for last: Sunday’s emotional “Here’s Negan” focused on … well, Negan – duh – and his relationship with the wife who named her infamous “vampire bat”. And not only did the hour suggest a full-force presentation by Jeffrey Dean Morgan, but it begged us to rethink whether “You Are So Beautiful” is tacky, gave us a glimpse of Negan’s introduction to a future Salvador and sent back to Alexandria, a version of the old (?) villain who is not afraid to cross paths – and maybe even swords – with Maggie. Keep reading, there’s a lot to unpack …
‘I CAN ONLY DO A LITTLE TO GET OUT OF HIS WAY’ | When the final episode of Season 10 began, Maggie went for a walk with Hershel, telling him that her grandfather liked to take a walk in the morning to get an idea of the day ahead. “It was the first thing then early back then? “asked the young man, making a joke about Judith’s cutest child title on TV. Remember, levity came to a screeching halt when Maggie spotted Negan working nearby – and at the same time, Carol spotted Maggie spying on the entire spy. It was a whole spy thing. Then Carol took Negan with her to check the rabbit traps – or so he thought. Really, what she was doing was taking him to her new one – unless I’m wrong, Leah’s old hut. ”Carol knew what she had promised Negan, but what could she do? The council voted to ban him, so she and Daryl took the liberty of removing their things. he couldn’t help wondering: “Did the council really ban me or is this more of a situation with Carol taking the reins?” Whatever it was, he would not accompany her back to Alexandria. , as a lovely (?) Farewell gift.
Alone with his thoughts that night, Negan was visited by a version of his petty spirit as a saving leader, who delighted in mocking him for believing that he could be accepted by the good guys. You are a clown, Negan told his former self, “a cult of personality without a cult”. But sticks and stones couldn’t even ding old Negan’s ego. “You are nothing without her,” said the antagonist, Lucille firmly in his hands. Shaken, Negan left the next day to find Lucille at the site of his last resistance; the bat had been left exactly where it had fallen when Rick cut his enemy’s throat. When Negan finally dug up what he was looking for, we went back 12 years, when he was tied to a chair and threatened by the leader of a biker gang (Rod Rowland, who had having auditioned to play Daryl once, don’t you think?). The bikers, it seemed, arrested Negan on his way back to his wife Lucille, who suffered from cancer, with the chemotherapy treatment he obtained at a post-apocalyptic mobile clinic. Assuming the documents had all kindsa Another good thing, too, the bikers wanted to know his location – and if he didn’t speak, his mistress’s chance of beating cancer would fall into the toilet.
‘LET’S PRETEND THAT IT’S SATURDAY’ | From there, we returned a few days, to Negan approaching the mobile clinic he was tracking with the gun in hand. Before things got worse, he was hit with a stick by – well, hey! – future savior Laura. At the time, she was just a nice young woman who worked with her father Franklin at the mobile clinic. And when I say cool, I mean truth cool. As soon as he could, Franklin untied Negan, fed him and asked why he was “trying to rob a bunch of doctors with an empty gun”. Lucille was in the middle of his treatment, explained Negan, when the world turned upside down. But following the doctors’ instructions, he managed to continue administering his chemo. What happened then? Looking back at another six weeks, we saw Negan and Lucille (Morgan’s off-screen wife, Hilarie Burton Morgan) debating how to turn off the generator. He wanted to, in the hope that a curious walker would walk away. She wanted him to simply dispatch the thing so that she could watch a Bond movie. In the end, he relented, but had a lot of trouble killing the zombie – he didn’t die even after being stabbed in the eye! – that she pulled her IV drip and used the last bullet to shoot him.
With gas becoming increasingly difficult for Negan to find, Lucille argued that they needed to go, find other people. They would, he assured her – as soon as he gave her the last three treatments and regained his strength. And man, except for Judith, you’ve never seen a Negan as sweet and tender as it was in the scenes during which he held his wife while she was shaking her chemo, singing softly in her ear her favorite song (the aforementioned classic Joe Cocker) and even playing with their colorful wigs. But on the subject of killing walkers, they disagreed. “It’s not even like killing an animal,” she said as another one moved heavily towards the generator. “It doesn’t bother me,” he insisted. “I’m just worried about getting used to it.” So they turned off the generator once more before eating a dinner of dog food and tap water. If Lucille had known the world would end, she said, she would not have been so angry that he spent $ 600 on a leather jacket – which she hid and now gave it to him as a birthday present. (Because who could say for sure? Maybe was her birthday.) She shouldn’t apologize to him, he said, not after everything that got her through. He couldn’t believe that she had stayed with him. “I stayed with you,” she said, “because I could always see the man you are now … even when you weren’t.”
‘THE TIME OF HISTORY IS OVER, BITCH’ | The next morning, Negan woke up to a horrible sound: dripping. The ice that was supposed to keep Lucille’s chemo cold has melted. It was ruined. But he had an idea. He would go after the mobile clinic he had heard about, maybe he could get them. No, she said. “I have something to tell you.” With that threatening note, we remember another seven months, for Lucille railing in Negan for spending $ 600 on “this Happy Days jacket s – t “when he didn’t get a new job with an assault charge hanging over his head. On the positive side, at least he prepared a good dinner. And she had bigger fish to fry, anyway. She needed him to take her home from his MRI the next day. You can’t do it, he said. He was meeting with his probation officer. Except she soon deduced that it wasn’t who he was with – he was with his friend, Janine. Some friend. What a husband. That night, Lucille waited for him to come home with a gun by his side. But instead of shooting him, she threw pamphlets about cancer on the table. Looking forward again, Negan couldn’t believe that Lucille knew about Janine and had still stayed with him. Why was she telling him now? “I want you to know that it paid off,” she said, “and it can stop.” All she wanted was for him to stay with her. He couldn’t do that, however. “We are not going to give up,” he insisted, “never.”
Back on the mobile clinic schedule, Franklin and Laura provided everything on Negan’s wish list, without asking for anything in return. In fact, as a biker gang hovered at night and he was out of bullets, Laura even gave him her baseball bat for protection – the future Lucille. Still, he revealed his location to the same bikers, who soon came back, tied Franklin up and made God knows what for poor Laura in the trailer. Although Negan didn’t even stop to help Laura – cold – he returned to Lucille too late to save her. “Please don’t leave me like this,” read the note she wrote on the bedroom door. In addition to him, he found her with a plastic bag over her head and a collection of empty pill bottles lying around. She had, of course, turned around. What followed was an overwhelming series of scenes defined as “You Are So Beautiful”. During them, Negan took out the plastic bag to look at his wife’s tortured face and snapping jaws. A portrait of a broken man, he didn’t have the heart to put it down. Instead, he added barbed wire to his stick, set his house on fire with it, and the Negan we met at the end of season 6 emerged from the flames. Shortening the biker bar, Negan shot, crushed and / or basically destroyed the leader’s henchman. Then, after giving Franklin the gun to fetch Laura and disappear, he sat down to have a little chat with the boss, who had said earlier that he was chattering too much. “This time,” noted Negan, “you better hope I never stop talking. When I do that, something very terrible is going to happen to you. “
‘IT’S LIKE BEING LOOKING AT THE WORLD THROUGH THE BLOOD’ | With that, Negan told the guy how he had lost his job. He and Lucille were at their favorite bar, playing their favorite song (you know which one) on the jukebox, and this d-bag was noisy and noisy. Lucille asked him to keep control. “He chose badly,” said Negan, remembering that he finally understood what it meant to be so angry that you saw red. He beat the guy to a pulp, took a dollar out of his wallet, and threw Cocker twice in a row. But his victim had a son who was studying at the school where Negan worked – that is, at the school for which he did not work. more time worked. So, seeing the red caused a lot of problems for Negan. “Now, when I see red,” he noted, “it’s just a matter of what I’m capable of… [and] I am beginning to think that I am capable of almost anything. ”Finally, he dropped Lucille on the scoundrel’s head. At this point, we return to the present. Negan hit a walker with Lucille … which cracked. In response, he took him back to the hut and apologized – to his wife, not the bat – for many things, including having named her after a bat! From now on, he concluded: “I will fight for you”. Outside that turning point, Negan returned to Alexandria, the s-t-devouring smile restored to his face, and told Carol that his new excavations would not work. “If you stay here, she will kill you,” she said as Maggie cast looks that seemed designed to do just that. “I just didn’t want your death on my conscience, and now it isn’t.” Unperturbed, Negan moved on, opening a smile for Maggie as he did so.
So, what was he playing at? And what did you think of the end of season 10? I know it was a bottle episode, but come on, it was really good, wasn’t it? Rate “Here is Negan” in the poll below and score comments with your ratings.