Warning: Spoilers are ahead for any The Walking Dead Fans that have not seen Sunday night's season premiere.
Alright Walking Dead fans, let's recap Sunday night's episode! If you're anything like me and are incredibly emotional especially when it comes to fictional characters, you wanted to pause the episode and crawl into a black pit of despair after seeing Jeffrey Dean Morgan's character, Negan's, beast like actions. It was by far the most disturbing Walking Dead episode yet. I have seen every season and episode, and this one tore me up the most. The graphics of this episode were also amazing, and if you love gore you'll love Sunday's episode. Now lets get to the meat of it all.
We open with Rick saying that he is going to kill Negan, not today, not tomorrow, but eventually. Leading to Negan taking him on a little trip in the RV. Rick is thrown out into the fog that has Walkers infesting every inch of it. However, Rick does make it out because, well, it's Rick. We see Rick on top of the RV, having flash blacks to the moments of the night. It is revealed to us that Abraham (Big Red) was the one to bite the dust from a few good blows from Lucille, but of course Abraham doesn't go down easy, and his last words are, "Suck. My. N*ts." As funny as it is, Negan unleashes hell on Abraham and smashes his head to bits. It's almost as if he's trying to win one of those "test your strength" carnival games. Of course we knew we were going to lose a character this opening episode, but I still thought no one else was going to die and that everything was going to be okay. My thoughts were proven false as Daryl gets up and cracks Negan in the jaw with a punch. Of course, Negan does not take well to this and says that he gave them one free pass, and the next time someone acted up he was going to, "Shut that sh*t down."
(If you have a light stomach I would not read on because it is very unsettling).
Next thing we know, Negan slams Lucille down into Glenn's skull twice, and the camera stays on it the whole time. We can see that Glenn's left eye is bulging out of the eye socket, kind of like when you squeeze a stress ball in one particular area. The most heartbreaking thing of it all is when he turns to a pregnant Maggie and manages to stutter "M-Maggie, I'll find you." To me, this means that he will find her in the afterlife or in the next life. By this point, my heart was being stomped into the ground by Robert Kirkman.
We then see Negan and Rick return, and Negan doesn't think that Rick understands that he belongs to him. So Negan shows us his twisted manners once more, by taking a belt and tying it around Carl's arm and then marking it with a sharpie a little above the wrist. He then tells Rick to take his hatchet (that he calls an axe) and use it to cut off Carl's arm. If he doesn't do it, then Negan is going to kill everyone there, the people in Alexandria, and eventually, kill him. Rick starts to blubber and tries to negotiate with Negan, but you can't get through to a psycho, so Negan denies him. Finally, Rick picks up the axe and starts to do it, but Negan stops him, asking him if he understands that he, and everyone/everything belongs to him now.
By the end of this episode, I wanted to send a hateful email to Robert Kirkman and ask him why he has to play our hearts like this. We have seen horrible people before Negan, like the Governor and the people at Terminus, but the Governor and the Terminus people were incredibly petty compared to Negan. I am extremely interested in seeing what they have in store for this season. I believe it will be one of the best ones yet, and it will be very heart wrenching in the episodes to come. You know that for sure because at the end, we see a completely devastated Maggie telling the rest to go home and get ready to fight Negan. It was a very powerful moment, including when Rick gets in the RV and goes to drive away, and he sees a walker but doesn't even attempt to kill it. It is minuscule to his problems now. At this point, we can see that in the apocalypse, humans are what we should be afraid of, not walkers.
