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The Walking Dead 10.22 Review – ‘Here’s Negan’
Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Negan, Melissa McBride as Carol Peletier-The Walking Dead_Season 10, Episode 22-Photo Credit: Josh Stringer/AMC
Loading...Welcome, at long last, to the actual finale episode of Season 10 of The Walking Dead! What a long and strange trip it’s been getting through this season, and this year. In tonight’s finale, we finally find out more about the one and only Negan, how he became who he was when we met him, and a glimpse at what his future may hold.
The plot: Carol takes Negan to Leah’s old cabin and tells him he’s been banished from Alexandria. Over the next day or so, Negan returns to the tree where Rick defeated but didn’t kill him, finds Lucille the bat buried in the dirt there, and reflects on his past by the fireplace. We learn that shortly before the apocalypse hit, Negan was a former high school gym teacher who got fired for an assault charge, cheating on his wife with her best friend, and on top of that Lucille was just diagnosed with cancer. They were managing to keep up with her chemo treatments with drugs and a schedule they got before things truly went to hell, but when the fridge went without power long enough that the last two bags were no good anymore, Negan set out to find a traveling group of doctors for medical supplies. Lucille tried to keep him from going, but he was determined to fight for her. Unfortunately, the search took six weeks, and he also got held up by some bikers who forced him to turn in the kindly doctors in exchange for his freedom. Alas, he returns much too late to save Lucille. At some point during his absence, Lucille zip-tied herself to the bed, overdosed on her pain meds and put a bag over her head, leaving him a note to not leave her this way. Heartbroken, Negan burned down the house with her walker in it, and took his new signature weapon to take out his rage on the biker gang, transforming into the man we first met. In the present, one last walker kill finally breaks Lucille the bat, and Negan burns the bat as he makes a final apology to his wife. He promises to keep fighting, and returns to Alexandria, telling Carol he plans to stay.
While these last six episodes have technically been part Season 10, I think we can all agree they occupy a very strange, in-between-seasons kind of space. They’re an odd set, very much not connected to the larger arc of Season 10, though very related to the fallout of the Whisperer War storyline, and have varied in quality. I think we can also all agree that once we knew the last episode would be about Negan, it’s the one we were all looking forward to the most, and I for one was not disappointed.
We’ve had hints here and there about Negan’s past: that he was married to Lucille before all this, that he cheated on her, that she was sick but didn’t die until after the apocalypse started. I admit I’ve lost track of what precisely we knew from the show already, but we certainly were missing the details. The point was that we knew Negan had been a very different person from the one we first met on the show, with hints of how and why he changed. But now, we finally have the full picture of this transformation.
Before the apocalypse, Negan was a rather unremarkable man. He had his good qualities and his flaws, things that redeemed him and things that made him despicable. He was a high school gym teacher who loved his job, but also a man who cheated on his wife and beat someone to the point of hospitalization over a song. He’s a man who yelled at kids while playing video games and lied about probation appointments and job leads, and a man who learned how to administer chemotherapy treatments in the worst of situations in order to save his wife’s life, who fought for weeks to find more treatment drugs for her to have a chance.
It’s only through both these best and worst pieces of him that we come to the man here today, in the present of the show. His deep love and devotion to her humanize him, give him strength, make him the best version of himself–the version Lucille saw even when he wasn’t being that person. For her, he learned and consistently performed a complicated medical task, for her he lived in isolation when safety in numbers and moving on from their house would likely have been safer, for her he went out into the world and searched for more medicine for weeks without once giving up. The world went to hell, and saving Lucille was the thing Negan clung to. Not other friends or family or even society. Just her. She was his world, and thus was losing her, and in such a heartbreaking way, broke him and made him into the worst possible version of himself. In his own words, he became that man to block out everything he felt, including the shame, but that’s the one he could never block out.
In fact, it’s interesting that when you consider Negan at his worst, he was in a way still acting to correct the mistakes he felt lead to Lucille’s death. He started off taking out Valak’s Vipers, a group that was absolutely preying on others for their own benefit. He saved Franklin and Laura, who would become one of his most loyal supporters. The network he built with the Saviors did help people survive by connecting them and sharing resources, the very thing that could have helped Lucille survive. He always said people are a resource, no doubt in part because they were a resource he shunned in the early days, and that cost him his wife (at least, in his mind). He didn’t even get to say goodbye to her until, essentially, this episode, twelve years after losing her in the first place.
This episode and how it unfolds also give some insight into the popular theory that Rick and Negan were so alike that if we’d followed Negan, we would feel he was the hero of the story. However, I would say that while that’s still partly true, there’s still a key difference. Negan when he wraps that barbed wire around the bat, when he gives that first pre-murder monologue, when he turns off everything he’s feeling, that’s more or less Rick if the “Ricktatorship” phase had never ended, if he’d stayed that hard after killing Shane. Or, if he’d been alone before that instead of having a group of people around him before, during, and after that phase, unlike Negan who only had Lucille and lost her without anyone else in his life at that point.
But more relevant in the here and now, does knowing and understanding Negan’s past, how he became that person, knowing how he feels about what he’s done now, change anything? Does it absolve him of his past sins? No. It doesn’t. Even before his night in the cabin, Negan has been trying to find a way to co-exist with Maggie and stay in Alexandria, but seemed ready to accept that he couldn’t. Now, however, he’s determined to do so. Lucille told him he had to let go and move on without her, and he says he’s ready now to do her (Lucille’s) fighting for her. Which looks like it means staying with the people he’s come to care about, the ones he considers his community now, but what does it really mean for him with regard to Maggie? Hard to say what will happen or what he even intends to do, beyond that he’s not going anywhere. Carol points out that Maggie will kill him if he stays, and speaks for basically everyone in saying that they wash their hands of it if she does. Negan doesn’t even argue the point. I suppose in a way he’s back to one his other core personality traits: being unpredictable.
This episode also, it’s worth noting, gave us some really great acting from Jeffrey Dean Morgan and his real-life wife, actress Hilarie Burton Morgan. Lucille really came to life perfectly, she had depth and vivacity and Hilarie gave us a huge range with her. It may only be one episode, but she delivered on every scene and note with Lucille. As well, JDM gave some fantastic range and gave Negan’s evolution some fantastic nuance. The callback framing in various shots as well also really helped the delivery of this storyline, too. All-in-all, a very well put-together episode and I’d say the best of this odd little add-on batch on Season 10.
Come August, the final season of The Walking Dead will be upon us! I can’t wait to see what’s coming and what the show has in store for us for it’s final 24 episodes. I’m not sure when The Waling Dead: World Beyond will be back for its second and final season as well, but I’ll be here for that as well when it does come out. Thanks as always for reading, stay safe, wear a mask, get vaccinated, and see you back here in August!
