It’s been almost five years since Jeffrey Dean Morgan made it his own first appearance as Negan on zombies. For all the criticism that those early episodes with Negan and the Saviors received afterwards, there was always something convincing about Morgan’s portrayal of the character. Even with all the “pants-worthy” discussions that accompanied him on a regular basis, the actor managed to take the malevolent villain and imbibe him with charisma, charm and threat alike, making it all too easy to understand. what kind of person others would follow without question. It wasn’t relatable, but it made sense; Morgan’s enhanced camp performance elements were an integral part of the character, a way to intelligently describe the fact that All Negan did then was, in a sense, a spectacle. He knew he was performing a show, and what helped him become magnetic was the fact that the viewer was never very sure who Negan was under such slippery bravado.
And now, half a decade later, we are finally unpacking the background story to one of the few characters who continues to keep zombies interesting in his last seasons. “Here’s Negan” makes sense as the final version of these bonus episodes of season 10, not only because it’s the best part of the group, but also because it actually offers the first episode, centered on Maggie, bringing the historical circle completely. Maggie she returned to her old life because it is perhaps the only place left that feels like home to her. And when he arrives, the man who killed her husband is right there, free and clear. Negan returns to Alexandria at the end of this hour not because it is the only place he feels at home, but because there is no such thing as home; “Home” as a concept ended when Lucille died. What this place represents for him, in my reading of that final look that both Carol and Maggie give, is fate. If Maggie kills him in the middle of the night, well, that’s fine. He deserves it. But he gave what was left of his time on earth to this community, to the idea of remedying – the “better way” that Carl insisted could exist here. Negan likes this idea. Even if it kills him.
But before that, we have Negan’s condensed history. It is very different from Here’s Negan comic book miniseries by Robert Kirkman, Charlie Adlard and Cliff Rathburn. With the exception of Lucille’s cancer, almost everything else has been revised, from Negan’s relationship with Lucille’s sister to the story of the nesting dolls. It’s still not ideal to keep throwing all this data at the viewer in quick succession (1 year earlier, six weeks earlier, seven months earlier, etc.), but it works better than it did in Daryl’s flashback episode, largely due to the way each is based on the previous one: we go from today, to Negan bound, being interrogated by a pair of motorcyclists, telling them his story about finding the doctor and his daughter and getting the drug to continue chemotherapy his wife. From there, we jump to his meeting with the doctor, where he tells the story of Lucille’s treatment six weeks before, the husband and wife surviving at home in an abandoned city while fighting cancer. But when the power goes out, destroying their remaining supply of medicine, he prepares to go for help – when she sits on Negan, and we receive another story in a story, this time from Lucille’s point of view, learning about Negan’s adventure at the same time as her diagnosis. From there, it comes back up, through each level of the narrative, the stories in the stories being pulled back to where we are again today.
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For such a dizzying pace as we get, it works remarkably well, thanks in large part to performances by Morgan and her real husband, Burton. Adoctors who play couples with significant others can be a real successful business, but here are the needles, with a moving and lived relationship, in which light chemistry goes a long way towards selling some of the most unlikely things (like Lucille’s sudden choice to put that aside her husband sleeps with her sister). Gravity moments are as strong as the most painful ones and while I believe there was some nonsense in dropping the “You’re so beautiful” needle after Lucille turned into a bed-bound zombie, gnashing her teeth at Negan, she was also quite strong before and after, establishing the intensity of their connection and the way death left him unconnected with the world, capable of … well, just about anything, as he admits to the motorcyclists who bound him earlier. Killing a few men for the first time in his life, you see the faint look out of 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 he thought he died with Lucille.
But as his bat splits in half after digging her up, he realizes not only the stupidity of investing his dead wife’s spirit in the inanimate object, but also the fake of his thinking mentioned above compassion had died with her. The reason he goes to find the bat in the first place is not to somehow make peace with things, because they are so much an acceptance that his pain will always be with him. “You’re nothing without her,” his vision of the old and cruel Negan tells her, and it’s true – just not necessarily the way old Negan might have thought. The bat, thrown into the fire, is the symbol coming to the understanding that deception married to Negan, the sadistic Savior Negan and the current penitent Negan are no different men; there are road stations that fade into the background of his memory of who has been with Lucille in recent months. His old sinister was worried about getting used to killing walkers, but the current Negan has realized the hard truth: that you can get used to anything.
Anything, that is, except the loss of the person who kept you connected to this world. “Here’s Negan” is ultimately a story of loss and regret and how those emotions can spin us in violent or human ways, simply flip faces of the same coin from our inability to calculate tragedy. Rick, Carl and the best in our group have always turned those feelings of loss into a determination to prevent such a loss for others – they have found the meaning to dedicate themselves to bastion against that pain for those around them. Negan, with his ironic and accepting smile at Maggie, found a similar meaning, but without any sense of self-preservation. “The bad news is that I have a few things on my chest this time,” he told the motorcyclist, before hitting his head. But now, he took everything off his chest. There’s nothing left to hold on to. There is only fate.
StrAy observations
- Did the leather jacket cost $ 600? Jesus, if I were Lucille, I would be upset with this law even though my husband was still employed as a classroom teacher.
- Lucille was a fan of James Bond movies.
- I straighten my hat introducing Negan’s eventual lieutenant as the doctor’s daughter, thus connecting a few points between the beginning of his new life and the ascension of the Saviors.
- There are a few monologues in this episode, but for my money, the best was Negan, who told the biker that he got into a fight with the guy who wouldn’t let Lucille listen to his song on the jukebox.
- Carol: “I did not want your death on my conscience. And now it’s not. ”
- Another nice touch: Showing how the future villain Negan looked inside him in normal times, only channeled in online video games.
- Thank you all for joining us to watch and discuss these bonus episodes of season 10. See you here later this year for the beginning of the end.