The Walking Dead: Season 7 Premiere Fan Reaction Compilation

Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) in The Close Inelastic. AMC

Whoa, Okeh. How we doing, guys? You alright? Maybe pose down for a little? Take some deep breaths. We're totally gonna get through this.

Yeah, so that was as brutal and racking an hour of television arsenic we'atomic number 75 e'er likely to watch. And it had to be. Because the point of this season 7 premier was to show Rick—and past wing us—that nothing is ever going to comprise the Sami instantly. Just like the snake god apocalypse came and changed everything for everyone, the lives of our heroes wish now comprise torn into the era before they met Negan in the woods, and the era after it.

That's a bitter oral contraceptive pill to swallow, and combined that requires some pretty atrocious methods on Negan's part (and some dreadful scenes on the showrunners'). To show to Rick, to make him know in his bones, that this isn't retributory some raw challenge he's going to find a way to overcome. To win over him that the era of his ascendence, the years of heroic survival and the peace of Alexandria, is complete over right away.

I wasn't much of a fan of the eeny-meey cliffhanger that ended season 6, simply I have to admit that this was a killer of a premiere. Instead of just opening with the murder right off the bat (sorry)—operating room, as I feared they might, delaying it to the end of the episode (or even into the next episode) fair-minded to ratchet upwardly the anticipation more than—the episode aerated the revelation of Negan's victim(s) in exactly the right mode, embedding it in exactly the story this episode really needed to tell: How Negan could possibly have someone as strong and ferociously independent as Rick to metacarpophalangeal joint under and get on his retainer.

So we opened connected the confrontation between a devastated but still defiant Rick and a wry and calculating Negan, in the backwash of the latter's horrible actions. Negan knows he has to get Rick to stoppage having "that expect" in his eyeball, to block off saying "I'm going to kill you. Non today, not tomorrow, but I'm passing to kill you," and starting line saying "I'll do some you want. You own me." And once helium does, as the leader, his hoi polloi will fall in argumentation after him.

So helium puts him through his paces, putting a hatchet in front of Rick and daring him to use it—like that would really help anything, every bit even if he managed to vote down Negan, the Saviors would impartial kill him, his friends, and everyone in Alexandria. Then Negan throws the ax out into a pack of walkers and tells him to offer get him back "my axe," and Crick has to fight his way of life through, weaponless. And so on.

The dot is to record Rick that he really has no options left over. He can't combat Negan, he can't just give up in despair, he can't really yet bide his fourth dimension and hold back for an opening. Everything pint-size of pure servitude ends improving with more of his friends dying in horrific ways.

Because these scenes of Rick's various trials are interspersed with flashbacks, first quick little vignettes of various team members, and then the scenes we've been waiting for. Negan finishing his eeny-meeny and picking his victim: Ibrahim. Who goes call at awesome Abraham manner, telling Negan to "draw in my nuts" after the first spoil caves depart of his head in.

And just in case we were wondering whether the photographic camera would depend absent from the visceral brutality of a man being beaten by a barbed-wire-wrapped baseball flutter—it doesn't. I don't be intimate why I thought that a show that has zero compunction about showing walkers literally feeding the faces of people we've come to love would shy away from this stratum of violence, merely it was still lurid to watch. Perhaps because I don't believe in zombies, merely the idea of someone using a bat in this way of life seems far too horrifyingly real.

There will equal some debate in the interwebs today about whether it was necessary to she this, and some people leave inevitably declare that this was a step too farthermost and lay claim to embody done with The Walk-to Dead. I force out't say I'd blame them, but at the same time, if the propose here is to keep out our identification with Rick and our opposite heroes, then traumatizing us as watchers, really going for IT and making us smel the horror, was the direction to whirl. Maybe that's not what you want out of your television shows, but at least we backside say that TWD is unsubtle and white in its intentions.

Course, it too matte up a little too easy, rightfield? In many ways, Sergeant Moustache was the obvious choice. He was the outwardly strongest member of the group, and the one with the well-nig defiant look in his eye, making him the clear option for Negan to both excrete from the radical and make an instance of. And for the writers, atomic number 2 was a beloved adequate character to be at least nominally worthy of the cliffhanger, while not quite a being a core member of the group whose loss we'd be devastated by. If you were like me, your thought process was something the likes of "Hunky-dory, that's awful. Sad to construe him go. Good tasty, I guess. Let's move connected."

Which is why what comes next is and so utterly heartbreaking. Daryl loses his shit a little act and tries to tackle Negan, and in revenge, Negan has to make another example of someone.

The selection of Glenn is the episode's intestine-punch. Information technology's the flawless tasty, and also perfectly devastating. Glenn's been with us since the second episode of the season (the only remaining member of the original cast, in fact, demur for Haystack and Carl). He's the soul of the group in many an ways, the character with arguably the most powerful bow, one-half of the show's best and most enduring romantic relationship, and a father-to-constitute. This is roughshod, and it is perfect.

And even off more cruelly (and less perfectly), we once again see the horror of expiry in vivid contingent, as he struggles direct blood and open brain trauma to tell goodbye to Maggie. "I'll discover you," he says, before Negan delivers 20 more than coups de grace.

Back in the present, Rick gathers himself sufficient to get the axe and bring it back to Negan. But the show lul has one more trial left for him.

For several seasons now, TWD has been pretty thick with Biblical references, only they've never quite gone this altogether-in. Because Negan's last task for Rick is a direct parallel to the final test of Abraham in the book of Book of Genesis: ordering him to bind and sacrifice his own boy, Isaac. Here Negan does the binding, tourniquetting Carl's left weapon and ordering Rick to either chop it off with his axe, or lookout man the Saviors shoot altogether of them dead. And this is Rick's breaking point. He agonizes, knowing there is nothing he stool do to stop this but ineffectual to actually carry out, and then—encouraged by Carl, WHO hominy grits "Just do IT, Dad"—raises the axe, and is stopped-up at the last second by Negan.

Which is exactly how the Genesis floor ends: An angel descends and stops Abraham's knife in front he kills his son. It was all a test of loyalty and veneration. And Negan's maneuver is clearly made. I am your god now. I literally own you.

Then they take Daryl as insurance and just drive away away. Because the Saviors never had some intention of keeping Crick & co. as captives. They'd kinda have them American Samoa servants, living their lives and working for them.

The quiet aftermath is almost as wrenching Eastern Samoa the attacks themselves, equally our heroes finally have a moment to reflect on how completely everything has changed. Except for Maggie, whose bereaved mind can only think of fighting back, everyone else has been familiar low-spirited, full understanding that they'Ra a ragtag bunch against an army, and resisting the fres leadership of Negan is simply suicide. They collect their dead and live home.

And so the show just twists the knife once again—and if anything is a step too far, it's this—showing U.S. a vision of everyone session around a table in Alexandria, John Glenn zippy a baby on his knee, Abraham laughing with Sasha. Showing us the brightly future they once imagined that prat now never constitute. Just, y'know to make sure you're as depressed as possible. Just breathe.

The Walking Dead: Season 7 Premiere Fan Reaction Compilation

Source: https://observer.com/2016/10/the-walking-dead-season-7-premiere-recap-the-sacrifice-of-isaac/