Dead Men Walking

Was That Gruesome Walking Dead Slaughter Actually Worth It?

The mystery is finally over.
This image may contain Clothing Apparel Coat Jacket Human Person Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Leather Jacket

After five months of teasing, The Walking Dead finally pulled the trigger (so to speak) in the Season 7 premiere. We now know who died a gruesome death at the business end of Negan’s bat. But was it worth all the runaround? We’ll explore after the spoiler warning.

It’s safe to say that The Walking Dead cliffhanger last season was unpopular with fans. The online backlash was so swift and so harsh that, as Variety reported from an analysis by Canvs:

According to the company, which analyzes the emotional content of social-media messages, more than 70% of all reactions on Twitter during the closing moments of the episode expressed feelings such as “crazy,” “dislike,” “hate” and “upset.” “Love” accounted for only 15.2% of all reactions, “good” for only 6.4%.

Even star Andrew Lincoln admitted that the finale was supposed to make the audience feel “angry,” “sick,” ”nauseous,” and “frustrated.” But in the face of all that backlash, The Walking Dead stars and creatives promised that the payoff in the Season 7 premiere would be worth all the secrecy and narrative knots. Showrunner Scott Gimple said at the time:

I ask people to give us the benefit of the doubt that it’s all part of a plan, all part of a story. I truly hope that people see [the Season 7 premiere] and they feel it justifies the way we’ve decided to tell the story. That is the way it is in our minds. I know what [the Season 7 premiere] is and I feel that it delivers on what [the Season 6 finale] sets up.

But what, in fact, did the premiere deliver? Glenn died almost exactly as he did in the comics. In other words, the show sent us through one fake-out dumpster death last season and one massive cliff-hanger over the summer just to add more tension to—well, exactly what fans expected would happen all along

On top of that, the show added one more fake-out: Abraham Ford. After seeing him die, some audiences, not knowing there would be two deaths this episode, may have thought Glenn was safe. But Ford is also dead at this point in the comics. So it’s a little unclear what Gimple meant last year when he promised some “hard left turns” from Glenn’s comic book story. Maybe those turns are yet to come?

Ratcheting the tension up as high as it could, the premiere waited 20 minutes into its run time before going to town on Abraham and Glenn. If you can say anything about this cliff-hanger payoff, it’s that it’s one of the most brutal things that has ever aired on cable television. Though as comic fans know, Glenn’s brutal death, at least, came directly from the books.

That didn’t stop fans on Twitter from recoiling at the bloody display.

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So, was it worth it? All that wait for the show to kill off one not-that-popular character (sorry, Abraham) and one very popular character everyone assumed they would (R.I.P., Glenn)? That depends on your metric of worth. Lauren Cohan certainly sold the hell out of Maggie’s grief. (This is, what, he third major devastation?) And while fans may be frustrated, but as comics creator Robert Kirkman admitted in a letter over the summer, “We did want you to talk. And talk you are. . . . The TWD team wanted to do something cool. We wanted to do something different and we did it to change things up . . . and keep this show in your mind.” So full marks for getting the conversation started, Walking Dead. Now let’s see how you sustain it.