The Walking Dead – Here’s Negan

By: Kelly Kearney

In one of the most highly anticipated episodes of the series, “Here’s Negan” looks back on the man behind the leather jacket, as well as the woman who helped inspire a reign of terror that left a bloodbath in his wake. Grab your bats, Negan fans, this flashback is going to knock your heads off!

Let Me In!

Nobody knows what it feels like to be obsessed with revenge quite like Carol (Melissa McBride). The hate she had for Alpha pales in comparison to the looks traded back and forth between Maggie (Lauren Cohan) and Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). With Alexandria still trying to recover from their last war, she is not about to ignore the signs of another one brewing. Unless she steps in, someone isn’t making it out of this alive. Having promised Negan she would be his advocate with the counsel, Carol is in an awkward position with Maggie and the others in Alexandria. She knows what it feels like to be the dumping ground for everyone’s anger and whether it is because she sees the change in him or the fact she never witnessed his horrors firsthand, Carol feels for Negan. After all, he did risk his own life to bring her that bald head. The least she could do is offer him a chance for a future.

The decision is made when Carol takes Negan outside the gates to look for food. It is a welcome reprieve from Maggie’s deadly glares and, besides, he might be many things, but boring is not one of them. As the two make their way through the woods they manage to get snag a rabbit in between some small talk. Negan is still waiting for her to speak to the others on his behalf, but Carol has a better idea…and it is not one he had in mind.

With a fresh meal in hand, Carol leads Negan to Leah’s unoccupied cabin that just so happens to be filed with all his stuff. “Daryl helped,” she says because the council voted to banish him. All things considered, a banishment is better than death or imprisonment and Negan knows better than to argue with her on that. He does; however, question if this was a decision made by the council or if Carol took the reins and decided for them. She responds with a thousand-watt smile and an apology, claiming the choice was out of her hands thanks to his most recent actions that left their community in ruins. She hands him the rabbit and leaves him to settle into this new life with an emphasis on “new” because living on his own is not something he is used to. At the Sanctuary, he had his army of dedicated saviors to hunt and gather supplies and that didn’t really change when he became Rick’s prisoner. His jailhouse slop was prepared for him, the most work he saw in a decade was picking tomatoes and decorating his parole shack. He isn’t exactly the MacGyver of the apocalypse, and somewhere deep down he must know that because after a few drinks around the fire, an old frenemy stops in for a visit.

“Little pig, little pig, LET ME IN” was a terrifying announcement many people heard right before they gasped their last breaths. A vulnerable Negan is ripe for the picking and this evil alter ego knows it. OG Negan (the red scarf, leather jacketed, demented leader of the Saviors is back) and he is just itching to corrupt his current self. Like a vampire, this hellish ghost emerged from the recesses of his mind to prod, poke and feed on his pain. He makes every evil attempt to spark Negan’s flames by feasting on his insecurities about the people of Alexandria. They still see him as the man who murdered their family and no amount of selfless good deeds will change that. The fact Carol and Daryl evicted him from the place he now calls home is proof they never will. With the devil on his shoulder Negan heads out to the field where Michonne said they left his beloved bat all those years ago.

Welcome home, Lucille

Shovel in hand, Negan digs while off in the distance we see a walker slowly creeping towards him. Hole after empty hole, he reminisces over the last time he stood under that tree. When Rick’s mercy came in the form of a knife to his throat, just before he lost his freedom for almost a decade. As the years passed by the earth changed as much as he had. It seems like a fruitless search until he hears the sound of his shovel striking wood. There she lies with grass and dirt dulling her barbed wire shine. Negan found his Lucille! His face breaks into a painful smile as the wood of the bat holds heavy in his hand.

With his mind on Lucille (Hilarie Burton), not the weapon but the namesake, Negan hurdles back in time to the moment OG Savior Negan was born. Told in flashbacks we see Negan Smith was just your average gym teacher and coach (team Saviors) living a boring life in the burbs with his wife. The two had the typical issues most married couples tend to have, like arguing over an expensive leather jacket purchase while sitting on unemployment. For a guy who lost his job over beating up a man Lucille tells her friend “had it coming,” spending $600 on a biker jacket proves that maturity had yet to enter into Negan’s life. No job means he spends his time in a Call of Duty haze, screaming at teenagers under his Iron Maiden poster while dodging shade from his exhausted wife. The fact Lucille put up with him was a testament to how devoted she was to their marriage. Unfortunately, that devotion was a one-way street as we see Negan fail at husband duty when he skips out on Lucille’s MRI to go sleep with her friend. Lucille has Cancer. And with a pistol in one hand and medical brochures in another, she waits for her philandering husband to come home. When he finally does she shelves the murder idea hoping her husband will grow up and help her through this illness. Little did either of them know that the world outside was dying faster than any Cancer could kill her.

Luckily for Lucille her diagnosis forces Negan to see the light. He breaks up with his sidepiece and becomes a dedicated husband to his sick wife. Locked in their unfinished basement as the world marinates in the dead, Negan does his best to make up for his infidelity by hunting for chemo drugs and setting them up with a generator with siphoned gas. Sure, the noise attracts the walkers, but without a little electric juice they cannot keep her infusions cold. One degree over the recommended temperature and the drugs are no good. If Negan is awful at killing walkers (he is), he excels in his entertaining bedside manner. But, thankfully, Lucille’s sharpshooting skills are no laughing matter. When a walker almost takes her man out, Lucille wheels her IV stand outside to put the walker down. She mutters her regret about wasting their last bullet, but all Negan feels is grateful because killing isn’t his thing. They might already be dead, but he doesn’t want to get used to killing. Talk about a different guy than the one who met Glen and Abe! As the apocalyptic days tick by, Negan and Lucille fall deeper in love.

Negan, The Leader of the Saviors, is Born

After a candlelight dinner, a joint and a night of lovemaking, Negan awakes to realize he forgot to turn the generator on. Lucille’s medication is ruined and she only had a few treatments left. Determined to save the life of his beloved, Negan decides to leave Lucille and hunt for the drugs. He had heard about a doctor and his daughter working out of a mobile clinic in the woods. Rumor has it that they have access to medical supplies and medication, and that is exactly where Negan plans to start his search. Lucille has other ideas and begs her husband to stay with her. In the end, he leaves her, swearing he will never give up. It was the worst decision he ever made.

Six weeks out in the woods and Negan is delirious, malnourished and desperate. In the cabin, Negan admits to himself that he left because he was too much of a coward to watch her die. Eventually, he finds the mobile doctor (Miles Mussenden), but not before his daughter, Savior Laura (Lindsley Register), and her bat finds him first. Laura knocks Negan out and her father ties him to a lab chair, giving him fluids and a whole lot of hope for Lucille. The doctor has the medication he needs and once Negan is feeling stable again Laura gives him a bat for protection and sends him on his way. That’s when he is kidnapped by a group of bikers who are also looking for supplies. They tie Negan up and threaten to destroy the chemo drugs unless he gives up the location of the doctor. Eventually, Negan caves and wins his freedom after he points the gang in the right direction.

With a cooler full of Lucille’s medication, Negan makes his way home only to find a message written on the basement door that reads “don’t leave me this way.” Inside he finds Lucille tied to the bed, pills littering the floor and a bag over her hungry walker head. After all he went through, Lucille died anyway. Perhaps that is why she showed remorse over wasting their last bullet or maybe it is why she begged him to stay and forget the drugs? Lucille knew she was dying and didn’t want to end her life without her husband by her side. His cowardice is his greatest regret and for an indeterminate amount of time we see Negan living with Lucille’s walker corpse as he plays his video games and tries to ignore the gnashing teeth of his dead wife. Sitting in his own guilt and trauma removes whatever humanity he had left. He couldn’t kill zombies before, so killing the one he loved most is all but impossible. Like all things, time heals wounds and Negan gets to the point where he is ready to leave Lucille behind him. He takes the bat Laura gave him and wraps it in barbed wire, then grabs that $600 leather jacket and sets the house and Lucille on fire. From the flames of his former life, a new Negan is born. Heaven help anyone who crosses his path.

Negan Comes Home

First on this new deadly path was the gang who kept him from Lucille. Vigilante justice rains down on them in the form of wooden barbed wire. Piles of bodies bleed out on the steps of the bar where the gang leader is torturing the doctor and Laura. These are the first humans this new and violently improved Negan has killed and, now that he has embraced his fears, he is really starting to like it. With all the others dead but their leader (Rod Rowland), Negan ambushes him and sets the doctor free. He ties the leader up and starts to tell him a story, one that comes with a warning: when he runs out of tales to tell this guy’s time on earth is up. The story is a short one, about a man who deep down had the heart of a killer but thanks to the love of his wife, that deadly beast never got a chance to come out and play. Now that his wife is gone, and this gang prevented Negan from being with her in those final moments, there is nothing left keeping him from letting that beast out. With that the story ends and so does his captive’s life. Negan finds he has a taste for killing, and this boy is HANGRY!

Back to the present at the tree, Negan winds Lucille up, swings and strikes down the meandering walker who was steps away from making him their next meal. Has Savior Negan gotten his groove back? No, not really, thanks to the effects of weather on wood. Time changes all things and what was once hard and deadly is now weak at its core. The bat splits along with the walker’s head; a reminder that in death we can be reborn, something he seems to have a personal understanding of ever since he set the real Lucille on fire. A rebirth is exactly what Negan will have to do if he has any hopes of surviving whatever this new reality is. With that truth rattling around his head, he goes back to the cabin to say his final goodbyes to his wife and the bat he named in her honor. Wrapped in a cloth like shroud, Negan tosses Lucille into the fire and puts his evil alter to rest right along with it. “I’m sorry,” he says as the bat burns. Sorry for all the murders he committed in her name and sorry that he was too big of a coward to be there for her when she needed him the most. He makes his dead wife a promise to live out his days in a way she would be proud of him – one that honors their love.

The next day Carol spots Negan making his way back to Alexandria. She tries to intercept any issues by laying the facts on him, “If you stay here, she will kill you,” she says motioning to a furious looking Maggie. Negan smiles, knowing he called Carol’s eviction right. The council never banished him – she was just trying to keep him alive as a way of holding up her end of the Alpha deal. She didn’t want his death on her conscience, but now that he is back and willing to take the risk his untimely death is in him. As he heads inside the gates he looks to Maggie and smiles as if he is thinking, “So be it. I probably have it coming anyway,” and he does, but change can be inspiring, almost as much as mercy in the face of wrath. Is it enough to sway their minds or was Savior Negan right all along? Will he always be the killer they met in that line up? Can these two coexist in one town? Find out this August when the final season of “The Walking Dead “returns!