David Morrissey's The Governor was not simply a sadistic villain who grasped control of a community, but rather an incrementally discovered personality that crafted actions and speeches to perfectly manipulate his audiences to devotion. And whatever else you might say about The Walking Dead, it's obsessively interested in the details of characters, from personal ideologies to familial histories. If the episode had ended with the death of some beloved character having their head turned into a substance not unlike beef stroganoff, the scene would be about them and their demise, how Negan affects Rick's group, rather than about Negan as a character. This decision keeps the scene focused on Negan primarily, which was the point of the sequence at the end of the day. It's a clever trick that, for me, paid off, with the sound of Lucille sinking deeper into some poor soul's skull perfectly underlining the thorough brutality of Negan's act. To review, at the end of the episode, the camera takes the perspective of the speechless victim and is whacked once or twice before the screen goes to black, with several more increasingly wet-sounding thwacks being heard after that. The character's arrival and his speech, however, is not what people have been barking about his morning, but rather the decision to not show who of Rick's group was the victim who tasted the business-end of Lucille, Negan's barb-wire-wrapped baseball bat. So when he arrived at the end of last night's season finale, properly entitled "Last Day on Earth," his opening monologue landed with a measured yet forceful grandiosity, with Morgan clearly enjoying the theatrical menace that denoted the character in Kirkman's comics. And to the credit of the show's creators and writers, his name comes up sparingly in season 6, enough to build up the sense of dread that the character, played by a particularly lively Jeffrey Dean Morgan, carries with him but not so much that literally nothing else seemed to matter. rather than modernity all make the series recall a time similar to when uttering the name Billy the Kid or Wyatt Earp could stun an entire saloon.įrom the middle of season 6 on, the name Negan has had a similar kind of power, as if the specter of death followed the name and sucked the life out of anyone who heard or spoke the name. The sense of mythology given to the characters, the rendering of a society where trade and labor are just as important as money, the popularization of violence and crime as kinds of social necessities, and the focus on universal themes - faith, murder, work, friendship, love, violence, etc. To me, the series is now more of a Western than anything else, as the world that Rick ( Andrew Lincoln) and his crew live in now is quite similar to the worlds that filmmaker John Ford investigated in the 1940s and 50s. That's an understandable gripe, though one I would argue misses the point of the series and its evolution in tone since the second season of the Robert Kirkman adaptation. What I imagine people are talking about when they say that "nothing happens" in the series is that there's been a lack of big action set-pieces, gore, and general bad-assery, which do still occur in the series but with increasing scarcity.
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