The Walking Dead's tenth season finale
puts the spotlight on one of the show's most notorious villains:
Negan, and it's full of surprises. Here's how the episode plays out, and what it means.
The episode begins as Negan is exiled from the community he helped save. He's given a cozy
little house outside of town, and asked to not return. While dealing with this unexpected exile,
Negan has a vision of himself in the past, as the Negan we meet at the end of season 6.
The presence of this previous version of himself implies that, while he's clearly
changed a bit since he was defeated and locked away, parts of his old self are still there.
Past-Negan chides present-day-Negan for trying to win over the Alexandrians by playing nice.
"It's time to face the facts, old man. You are nothing without her."
The "her" here refers to Lucille, Negan's trusty baseball bat. But, of course,
it also refers to Lucille, Negan's wife, and the namesake of the bat.
Negan appears disturbed by the vision, but the next day,
he goes to the tree where he believes his bat was buried after his showdown
with Rick in season 8. This is when we get our first flashback, to twelve years in the past.
Negan is tied to a chair and a gang leader called Baxter is interrogating him about
where he found his supply of chemo drugs, which is somewhat of a rarity in the post-apocalypse.
It's clear that this Negan isn't the one we've come to know later on. He's less self-assured,
has a hard time killing walkers, and doesn't quite have that swagger that has come to
define his character. Negan begins to tell the story of how he got the chemo drugs.
The drugs Negan is carrying came from a mobile medical clinic. In a flashback, he makes a feeble
attempt to rob the clinic's doctors, but someone with a baseball bat quickly knocks him out.
Eagle-eyed viewers will recognize his attacker as Laura, who later becomes one of his most trusted
allies in The Saviors. When Negan comes to, he tells Franklin, the head of the operation,
the story of why he needs the drugs, which begins flashback number three.
Six weeks further into the past, in the early days of the outbreak,
Negan is living with his wife Lucille, who's undergoing chemotherapy. Negan is
an attentive and loving husband. However, they're quickly running out of supplies,
and even though Lucille only has a few rounds of chemo left, their remaining stash of drugs
spoils during a fridge malfunction, forcing him to rob the medical clinic.
When Negan finishes telling his story, they're remarkably generous and kind to him.
They feed him and give him the drugs he needs, telling him they only want to help people.
Negan seems genuinely moved by their generosity.
Thanks to these cascading flashbacks, fans can finally see aspects of Negan's personality
that were buried in the years that followed. He's more vulnerable, without allies, real weapons,
or survival skills, and it changes how he interacts with the world.
As Negan is leaving the clinic, Laura gives him the familiar baseball bat
they'd previously used to knock him out. But there are even more flashbacks;
in the midst of the scenes detailing Lucille's chemo troubles, we're taken back to the earliest
days of the outbreak. It also introduces a different moment in Negan's personal growth.
Pre-collapse Negan, as it turns out,
is a bit of a lout. He loses his job as a gym teacher after beating someone up, and
he's spending his days playing video games. He's also cheating on Lucille with one of her friends,
something that prevents him from being with her when she first receives her cancer diagnosis.
It's pretty clear how much Lucille's cancer changed Negan — or, rather,
how much his love for Lucille changed him. Later, Negan weeps while Lucille
recounts how she learned about his affair, but she tells him that she forgives him.
"I want you to know that you made up for it."
The episode demonstrates just how transformative those emotions were for him during the earliest
days of the apocalypse, so how did he then go on to become the Negan we know?
Back in the first flashback, Negan is desperate to bring the chemo drugs he's
carrying back to Lucille, so he gives up the location of the mobile clinic.
After the gang rounds up the doctors, they let Negan go.
Lucille had previously begged Negan to forget trying to save her life,
and instead just stay with her until she died. When he finally arrives back at
home with the drugs, Negan discovers that he should have listened to her. Lucille,
now a walker, is on the bed in their room. She appears to have purposefully overdosed
on pills and tied one arm to the headboard to prevent her from later attacking Negan.
Written on the door is a harrowing phrase: "Please don't leave me like this."
It's a crushing moment for Negan, who's spent the entire apocalypse trying to keep Lucille alive.
After sitting with her for a while, he goes outside to a nearby fence
and uses some barbed wire to put the final touches on Lucille the bat.
Once he's said goodbye to Lucille the person, he burns down the house.
Back at the gang hideout, Franklin is being tortured for information
about where he gets his medical supplies from. Negan puts a stop
to it by killing most of the gang members, but leaving Baxter alive.
It's here where viewers get their first glimpse of the Negan they know.
Dressed in his signature leather jacket and brandishing his bat Lucille,
Negan tells Baxter about the man he beat up who got him fired. But now, the rules have changed.
"Now, when I see red, it's just a question of what I am capable of."
Back in the present day, Negan digs up Lucille the bat and brings it home to his cabin. He speaks to
it as though it's Lucille herself, apologizing for leaving her, and even apologizing for naming his
baseball bat after her. Negan then places Lucille the bat into his fireplace and watches it burn.
But things aren't quite that cut and dry. The next day, Negan strolls back into Alexandria.
When Carol confronts him, he tells her that he's not interested in living in exile.
Carol says that Maggie will kill him if he moves back, and makes it clear that now
that she's tried to help Negan, she won't intervene. Negan agrees and continues on,
looking at an infuriated Maggie as he walks by. The mischievous grin he wears while he observes
her suggests that Negan's new chapter won't necessarily include peacemaking.
Based on how season 10 ends, it feels inevitable that the conflict between Maggie and Negan will
boil over very soon — and that it won't be pretty. While Negan's past reveals that he's
a complex character and that his propensity for violence is just one facet of his personality,
it also demonstrates that violence is something that has always existed within him,
even if it's hidden under the surface.
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