“Your property now belongs to Negan.”
And with those six words, The Walking Dead capped off a thoroughly frustrating and underwhelming mid-season finale with a bang.
Though he (allegedly) won’t appear until the season six finale in the spring, The Walking Dead has been dropping several hints as to the arrival of the nefarious, arch-rival to the Ricktatorship and leader of The Saviors known as Negan for close to two seasons now. In the fifth season opener, the show teased at the grizzly fate suffered by Glenn Rhee at the hands of Negan in the comic books. In this season’s sixth episode, Negan’s right hand man, Dwight, was introduced, as was a subordinate group of thugs led by an even more mysterious man named Wade.
Unfortunately, yesterday’s finale did little to advance the Negan plot…until a post-credits sequence that was shown during Into the Badlands. In it, Daryl, Abraham, and Sasha are confronted by a group of heavily-armed bikers who demand that they hand over their truck, weapons, porn, and emergency napkins or suffer the dire consequences.
But as we’ve come to expect from The Walking Dead, the big reveal doesn’t come until the final moments, when one of the biker’s name-drops Negan — who we now know will be played by none other than Jeffrey Dean Morgan.
While it didn’t exactly make up for a tedious mid-season finale, the “Prologue to the Next Chapter” did set up what should be an intense and thoroughly engrossing second half of season six.
SPOILERS AHEAD!! My question is: In light of these new developments, will the Walking Dead showrunners dare to place Daryl under the knife (bat) instead of Glenn?
