The Walking Dead Season 10, Episode 22: "Here’s Negan" Recap and Review
WITH EVERY ELEMENT - INCLUDING AN EMMY-WORTHY TURN FROM JEFFREY DEAN MORGAN - FIRING ON ALL CYLINDERS, ‘THE WALKING DEAD’ CLOSES OUT ITS TENTH SEASON WITH A SERIES-BEST EPISODE.
“Here’s Negan” feels like showrunner Angela Kang reaching to achieve the kind of recognition for “The Walking Dead” in this decade that individual episodes of AMC’s earlier flagships, “Breaking Bad” and “Mad Men”, achieved in the last one. By this I mean to say three things. The first is this: forget my side musings four weeks ago about how the sixth-season entry “Here’s Not Here” was “something unlikely to be topped,” and forget my follow-up a week later when I said “One More” might have managed to do so, as “Here’s Negan” has managed to blow both away. The second is that this is the kind of all-time great episode that belongs on the same kind of “best episodes of the decade” lists that the likes of “Ozymandias” or “The Suitcase” from those two other shows seemed to dominate, a level that, even at its highest highs, “The Walking Dead” hasn’t quite reached before. The third is simple: Jeffrey Dean Morgan deserves the series’ first-ever acting Emmy nomination (and win).
Just as it says on the tin, this week’s finale is almost entirely carried by Negan (Morgan). We spend just a moment at the start with Maggie (Lauren Cohan) and her son Hershel in Alexandria, but as they walk down the street past Negan, the POV of the episode shifts instantly to him. Carol (Melissa McBride) notices the tense situation and takes Negan out of town, under the guise of a supply run. Negan barely has the chance to thank Carol for getting him away for a bit, when they arrive at Leah’s abandoned cabin from “Find Me”. There, Negan sees that his belongings have been moved in, and Carol explains that she made the call to exile him from Alexandria.
Now left on his own, Negan spends the night at the cabin, where he hallucinates a version of himself - the villainous, sarcastic, leader-of-the-Saviors version - who mocks him for thinking the people of Alexandria would ever accept him after what he had done to them years ago. There have been untold thousands of scenes like this written for television and film, where a character is “speaking with” themselves. What you often see - especially on camera, when the work in the moment revolves around each given shot - is an actor just playing the scene straight on both sides, as if they’re acting opposite someone. It doesn’t matter that they’re really just playing opposite themselves; they perform like they would in a normal one-on-one scene.
There isn’t anything wrong with that interpretation, but it becomes stale once you’ve seen it enough times. Even in “The Walking Dead”, this trope has shown up repeatedly. The reason Morgan’s scene with himself stands out is because he takes full advantage of it. He plays the hallucination of Negan like a spirit in the room, antagonizing the real Negan with aplomb, but then he plays the real Negan not as if he’s just having a conversation with the hallucination, but rather as someone who is aware that no one is really there, but can simultaneously feel it getting under his skin.
“You’re a clown. A cult of personality with no cult,” Negan barbs at his past self, staring into the fire, mourning the loss of the man he was before all of this, the man he could’ve been, the man he couldn’t be...the man he tried to be anyway, when all was said and done. But when his mind wanders to the baseball bat his hallucination wields - “Lucille”, the piece of him that was left out in the world after the Saviors lost the war with Alexandria - that’s when Negan finally faces off against his hallucination as if it is there, smashing a drinking glass in its direction.
That interaction with his psyche prompts Negan to go out the next morning, to the field where Rick defeated him all those years ago. Negan remembers Rick slicing his throat open with a shard of stained glass, remembers how Michonne gloated to him after his capture about how the bat was abandoned...and then starts digging holes. A lone walker descends on the field from a distance, and Negan sees it, but ignores it. Soon, Negan strikes oak. Sure enough, there it is: “Lucille”, as Negan called the bat, dirty as hell but intact, barbed wire still coiled around its barrel. Negan cracks a wicked grin, but then we suddenly jump backwards twelve years, before we even have a chance to consider what awful things he could be scheming.
We find a younger, more aloof version of Negan in the first months of the apocalypse, being interrogated by a vicious biker named Baxter (Rod Rowland). Negan has a set of chemotherapy treatments in a cooler, and the bikers want to know where he got them, presumably so that they can steal other medical supplies for themselves. As Negan goes into a story about how he found the medical convoy, we witness the backstory with him, going back again, to “two or three days” before. Negan finds the medical camp, holds the head doctor (Miles Mussenden) at gunpoint - with an empty gun, to boot - and realizes that the camp’s “guards” are just mannequins. This is only a moment before he gets knocked out by the man’s daughter: Laura (Lindsley Register), who we know as a future Savior and, after the war, a valued member of Alexandria who was killed earlier this season by Beta (Ryan Hurst). When Negan wakes up, the head doctor, Franklin, talks to him. Negan explains that he was trying to steal the chemotherapy treatments for his wife. Negan claims that treating her isn’t so complicated, “unless something goes wrong.”
Off that, we jump back another six weeks, calling attention to the episode’s structure. There’s this awful film noir from 1946 called “The Locket”, where we start with Brian Aherne, who sends us into a flashback and - during the flashback - encounters Robert Mitchum, who goes into his own flashback while speaking with Aherne...and so on. It’s a gimmicky structure at best and nauseating at worst, not because of it being a flashback-within-a-flashback-within-a-flashback, but because every time we go one level deeper, the central character of the film changes. The reason that this structure, after failing so miserably in “The Locket”, works 75 years later in “Here’s Negan”, is because we’re constantly - with only one, brief exception - experiencing Negan’s memories.
The heart of “Here’s Negan” comes through in this middle section of the episode. We’re introduced to Negan’s late wife, Lucille (Hilarie Burton, Morgan’s real-life wife), as Negan gives her one of her final chemotherapy treatments. The chemistry between these two characters, because of the triple threat of the script, the ability of the two performers, and the real life love they have for one another, is instantly palpable. We also learn a great deal in a short time about how Negan operated before he was really Negan. He turns their generator off because there is a walker outside, having been drawn to their house by the noise. Negan takes this course of action attempting to avoid killing the walker, but ultimately is forced to when plan A doesn’t work. However, plan B doesn’t exactly pan out either - Negan’s attempt to kill the walker instead leaves him in a spot where Lucille, still hooked up to her chemotherapy equipment, is forced to come out and shoot it. Lucille using that bullet later forces Negan to try his luck at robbery with an empty gun, about as useful as no gun.
We get to spend time with Negan and Lucille - unlike “Diverged”, it’s not a bland or aimless series of “day in the life” scenes, but rather something incredibly profound - as Negan holds his wife at night during her night tremors, humming “You Are So Beautiful” into her ear; as they spend their days goofing around in wigs; and as a different walker finds their house. Lucille tries to reassure Negan that he can just kill the walkers, that it’s “not like killing a person,” and that he can’t let it bother him. Negan counters that it doesn’t, but that his concern is rooted in not wanting to get used to it. They sit down for dinner, where Lucille gives Negan the leather jacket that he would go on to make iconic. It’s revealed that Negan blew $600 on it right before the apocalypse, infuriating Lucille at the time.Morgan gets another opportunity to showcase his absolute command of craft as a performer in just 40 seconds, as he celebrates, with infused regret, the fact that Lucille has stood by him through everything. “I stuck with you,” she explains, “because I could always see the man you are right now, even when you weren’t.”
To hammer the point home, at this point in the episode Lucille has been in “The Walking Dead” for eight minutes, and her relationship with Negan feels as fully formed, as engrossing, and as much of something that, as an audience member, you want to work out, as any other romantic pairing on the show. And with that, the tragedy of what follows hits so much harder. Negan’s freezer fails, spoiling the chemotherapy treatments and sending him on the path to the medical camp. Lucille urges him not to go, not to leave her alone and vulnerable, and to do so, she sends us one final level deeper into the flashbacks, taking us back to the very start of the outbreak, when no one realized that this thing was going to overwhelm the world with zombies. We get to see the “normal” home life of Negan and Lucille, we get to learn that Negan lost his job as a teacher, that he beat the crap out of a guy in a bar…and that he was cheating on Lucille with her best friend. That final bit of information comes to us at the same time that Lucille’s cancer diagnosis comes to her. We only spend a couple minutes in this particular flashback; just enough time to remember that these characters once lived in the same vibrant, alive world that we take for granted each day.
The reason the episode dives into that at all, is because Lucille tries to use her knowledge of the affair to reassure Negan that he doesn’t have to risk his life to give her three chemotherapy treatments, because he “made up for it,” and that all she wants is for him to stay with her. “We went down swinging,” she says, accepting her fate calmly, “I need you to do my fighting for me.” But Negan refuses to give in, so blinded by his need to save Lucille that he can’t see the harm leaving would do her. We end up back at the medical camp, where Franklin and Laura give Negan the chemotherapy treatments he needs, and send him on his way. However, Laura warns him of a gang that “owns the roads at night,” and gives him the baseball bat she knocked him out with...“Lucille” sans barbed wire. Just as Negan gives the bat that same mysterious grin, we’re once again interrupted by Baxter, who insists that Negan stop recounting his story and tell them where to find the medical supplies. Baxter threatens to shoot Negan, who gives in, betraying Laura and Franklin’s location so that he can get the medicine to his wife.
The very next thing that happens is something we knew was coming - Negan recounted it to Gabriel in the episode “The Big Scary U” three years ago - and yet it still hits like a sack of bricks. When Negan returns to Lucille, he finds a note scrawled on the door - “please don’t leave me like this” - and discovers her as a walker, having taped a plastic bag around her neck rather than succumb to the cancer. Negan deeply mourns this discovery - another powerhouse scene for Morgan - before he goes outside, wraps the baseball bat in the barbed wire that lined his home, sets the house ablaze...and then heads off to unleash absolute hell on the bikers. Baxter is in the midst of torturing Franklin when, outside, Negan gets his first-ever kill - using “Lucille” to smash in a biker’s skull akin to how he would later kill Glenn - and then systematically eliminates the bikers one by one. Franklin helps Negan subdue Baxter, before going off to find Laura.
Negan launches into a speech like the ones he would later develop a notoriety for: he tells Baxter how he had never killed a man before tonight, but had nearly done so at a bar, after said man disrespected Lucille, and then came at Negan when the latter confronted him. “Seeing red was a bad thing then,” Negan says, “but now, nobody’s keeping score. Now when I see red, it’s just a question of what I’m capable of...so this is for not killing me.” Negan takes the bat to Baxter’s head, and we instantly jump back to the present. The way in which “Here’s Negan” automatically jumps to the present is not just a bold editing choice; it’s the right one. We could’ve spent time showing how Negan recruited Laura to his cause, to how the Saviors’ power grew, but that would’ve required either extending the episode’s runtime, or eating into the time we got to spend with Lucille. Instead, all of that material is free real estate, either for future flashback episodes or a “Negan and the Saviors”-type spinoff, or just for audiences to fill in the blanks themselves.
Now in the present, the walker that was so far away earlier has caught up to Negan, and Negan uses “Lucille” to kill it, but the bat finally caves in to all of the hits, all of the people and walkers alike that it killed, and splits in two. That night, Negan cremates the destroyed bat, while simultaneously saying to Lucille the goodbye he wasn’t able to twelve years earlier. “I miss you,” he murmurs at the glowing fire, “and I am gonna do your fighting for you.” The next morning, Negan walks back into Alexandria, in front of Carol, Daryl, and Maggie. Negan inquires about where everyone is - searching an abandoned military base, in an apparent setup for one of next season’s plot threads - and Carol offers to bring a fair share of what they find to Negan’s cabin. Negan rebuffs the offer, declaring his intent to return to Alexandria, to which Carol agrees to ask Gabriel to loan Negan a car so he can retrieve his things. This particular point is interesting, as Gabriel’s presence means either that he and Aaron returned from their journey in “One More” - which ended with them still pressing forward - or that they haven’t gone on it yet, which seems the more likely scenario. Carol warns Negan that “if you stay here [Maggie] will kill you. I just didn’t want your death on my conscience, and now it’s not.” Finally, as Negan walks off into town, he shares a look with Maggie, who glares at him with pure hatred. Undaunted by this, Negan lets loose one final grin to himself.
Morgan is an absolute powerhouse during all of “Here’s Negan”. It’s this final shot, though, where he cracks a giant grin at a situation that would upset most other people, that really brings the entire episode home. Negan isn’t grinning because his presence torments Maggie. He grins because he is going to make living in Alexandria work, and he is going to do it his way. Negan knows Maggie can’t kill him when it would come at the cost of the entire town watching her murder a man who isn’t fighting back. He’s proven himself to many of the Alexandrians; now he needs to find a way to prove himself to Maggie. In that sense, the chase is on for Negan, leaving us in an incredibly gripping place for the final season.
Laura Belsey delivers another home run for “The Walking Dead”. Her collaboration tonight with Morgan is the kind of director-actor output that we more commonly associate with cinema than with television, but the results are just as powerful. With the final season now in production, one can only hope that Belsey has been enlisted to helm as many episodes as she’s available for. On top of that, although Carol has much more of a peripheral role compared to “Diverged” last week, David Leslie Johnson’s script is something of a course correction for the character. Gone is the moping about, the flip-flopping between being close with Daryl and being estranged; here we have a Carol far more in line with where we left off at the end of “A Certain Doom”, making calculated moves. As she says at the end, she tried to help Negan out, but she only led the horse to water; it was up to Negan to drink, and he chose not to.
Also, although they had no dialogue together, it was nice to see Daryl and Carol share that final scene, implying that they’re at least on speaking terms again. It’s important that the pieces be set right for the final season. It’d be a tough sell to move forward with the Daryl and Carol spinoff if they went into it hating one another. Luckily, “Here’s Negan” probably couldn’t have done much of a better job of bridging this season with the final one. It’s going to be a long wait between now and the fall, but “The Walking Dead” will at least be coming back off the momentum of its best episode yet.