It amazes me that walking dead could have the worst episode of the series, to arguably one of the best ever on the show; back to back.
Best episode of the entire season
how did the come from the boring rat-chasing to a well written episode of the only interesting character left lol Jeffrey is amazing btw
Great episode! This Negan episode is few seasons too late, but is a damn good one!
What took them soooooo long to make an episode like this? This is really the only episode in this extended season 10 that you can call "good". As good as the episode was, it's also annoying though that they wasted the other 5 episodes telling origin stories of dogs and literally chasing rats. I hope they end this series with Negan actually saving everyone, and Maggie killing him anyway, because even if he is the ONLY interesting character left, the show and his story should end. Daryl and Carol and their little spin off series interests me as much as watching a 45 inning baseball game, their time came and went and they passed the point where anyone cares, but they can at least end this on a high note with Negan redeeming himself while still getting what should've come to him a few seasons ago.
This episode comes late for me, and I think it's the best of the season. It's about time Negan's story was told.
The best episode of the walking dead in at least 5 years. This should have been a feature length film. Incredible. JDM is amazing!
Damnnn this episode was heartbreaking... I cried rivers watching this!
Touching story about Negan but yet so incredible. :hearts:
Interesting and boring at the same time
Good episode. This is character growth. Dudebros who love him as an alpha cult leader will be disappointed but you can't have the previous seasons villain around still bashing people's heads.
Also, the ending reminded me how underwhelming Maggie's reintroduction was.
[6.7/10] There’s a time-tested set of questions to help critics evaluate something: 1. What did the episode try to do? 2. How well did it do it? 3. Was it worth doing?
The answers for “Here’s Negan” are pretty easy. What did the episode try to do? It wanted to tell a Negan origin story. How well did it do that? Pretty well! There’s some ambitious structure and good acting and efforts to establish what makes the character tick. Was it worth doing? Absolutely not.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not opposed to flashing back and letting us see glimpses of who Negan was before the world fell now and then. But he’s the type of character who feels more compelling as a fully-formed force of nature who simply arrives with a few brief descriptions of his backstory that let the audience fill in the blanks. After five years, we know who Negan is. We get his deal and his potential. Spelling it out like this, dramatizing it explicitly, doesn’t really add anything.
Honestly, it feels like Solo: A Star Wars Story to me -- an unnecessary background chapter that feels painfully superfluous in its attempt to explain a character’s personality through their personal history, when the journey we see them take in the present told us everything to know. More to the point, the episode provides cheesy origin stories not just for Negan’s persona and transformation, but for the silly trappings of his “cult of personality” like his leather jacket, his bat, and even the barbed wire he wraps around it.
The thing is that if you made this episode about a different character, and stripped away all the cringe-worthy prequel stuff, I think I’d appreciate it more, and at least rate it in firmly “good” territory. The story of a regular fuck-up, pulled back to the side of his better angels when he has someone who depends on him and something to make up to them, vacillating between cruelty and kindness, has legs. It’s just that we already knew this sort of thing about Negan, so all this episode does is turn subtext into text.
That said,, there is some juice to seeing the different stages of Negan’s life. I’ll confess, while I admire the ambition, I think the nesting doll structure of the episode went a little too far in places. But the story snippets connect together well and feel complete by the time we’re done with them.
I also largely enjoyed the scenes between Negan and the real life Lucille in their quarantine hut. I didn’t realize until after the fact that Hilarie Burton, the actress who played Lucille, is Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s real life wife. That explains why, even when their scenes weren’t super well written, the chemistry between them, the sense of intimacy in tense or hopeless situations, felt real and plausible enough to carry their scenes.
The writing did them no favors, though. Some of Negan’s speeches in particular were overwritten as hell, and again, spell everything out despite the fact that the audience can glean what it needs from his actions. (As an aside, I think Jeffrey Dean Morgan is a stellar actor, but him as the male lead in a soft-hearted indie drama felt tonally weird at times. Maybe it’s just because he looked strangely like Aaron Rodgers.)
But the thrust of the episode is clear -- it’s a question of who the real Negan is and which side of him he’ll let out. I like the idea that Lucille put up with his asshole side because she saw the worthy heart and potential within him. It’s a hoary tale, but a well done one that justifies his central choice in the episode, returning to the people to whom he owes a debt because it makes him a better person, rather than staying alone and letting himself become The Savior again.
I just don’t know if we need all this rigamarole to arrive at that point. There’s something sweet and melancholy about him burning his bat and apologizing to his wife, but for the most part, “Here’s Negan” just tells the audience things it already knows, in ways that we don’t really need to see. The way the show goes about that is good enough, but it’s a project the show would probably be better off without.
(10/10) - The greatest episode of The Walking Dead.
I'm guessing this is the episode that unfortunately made people start hating Maggie
Yep I knew this was going to be the best episode yet and I was 100% right! WOW what a great episode!!
i love any time i get to spend with jeffrey dean morgan. but i have to ask, WHY did we just spend a whole episode looking at carol chasing a rat when there was this much to be told about negan?? they crammed all of this (presumably) important exposition into one episode so we could watch carol make soup???
also i still really hate maggie. so much.
Knowing it’s Dean Morgan’s actual wife makes this episode so much better
There were consequences to me seeing red. Seeing red was a bad thing then. But see, now nobody's suing anybody, nobody's getting fired. Hell, nobody's keeping score. Now, when I see red, it's just a question of what I am capable of. See, I am starting to think that I am capable of damn near anything.
This one was also not the best did only watch half..... who needs that story now.
We kind of knew this already... xD
No wonder everyone writes best episode - after 20 or so really bad episodes it doesn’t take much to mark this one as best episode
The best episode for this season!!!!
The best episode for this season! Great Negan!
This show is beyond boring now it’s sad this show was exciting every week now it’s on its last leg . I only watch it cause been watching from
Day one
Best episode in a long time.
This episode was certainly worth doing but it should have happened ages back. It was a well composed origin story for Negan, even if the leap from losing his wife to the caricature he was when he first appeared as a proverbial mustache-twirling super villain is still a little bit of a stretch.
The character needed this episode a good couple of seasons back to give him that much needed depth, so it's odd the show waited until the 11th hour to do it. Still, it's certainly a positive entry after the pointless filler episode that was last week. This may not have moved the story forward that much but it definitely felt a necessary addition to the show.
The highlight of the whole show. A true and marvelous ending for Lucille and.... Bro.... Negan!
Finally, missed the hell out of that damn smile at the end, about time for the negan character to take a little spin back to it’s heights…
she only has three treatments left :( what the hell
I don't think it was a necessary story to tell but having so many boring character stories I love that they did one for the last one I care abount. My Negan is back! I couldn't be more happy about his last second smile and Maggie's face. I would LOOOOOOOVE for him to kill her off, she was interesting for a season or two, I don't why they kept her for so long. She has to die at the end of all of this O.O
God, I fucking love Negan! I wish I got to see more of that unchained side of his. But at least I know the full story now.
I really ask myself why I do not stop watching this shit. I think it's just after this long, I just want to see the end. It's quite boring since Saviours and even before. Vault episodes, just to say "hey, here, 8 episodes more", but you could watch them at x4 speed and you wouldn't care.
And now it seems Negan would be the bad guy again? Wow... what a plot twist
I remember waiting every Monday night to watch a new episode with my brother, both extremely excited about it. Now? It's been 4 or 5 seasons he stopped watching the series. I should have done the same.
good episode! love Negan and was in my opinion the best bonus episode, but I did appreciate them all on some level. They were more intimate and helped go into the internal subtle battles and connections between characters. Those complaining about them have to understand the last 6 episodes after the whisperers, were filmed with covid safety, like less characters & not as many up close killings etc. And they were actually BONUS EPISODES
I agree with other comments that this episode was the best in a long time. However, I think the story should have been earlier in the season as it wasn't really season finale material.
Im pretty sure they had this on the bag and just added some stuff.. this episode is a MUST if you are a Negan fan, and it takes some stuff from the comics...
In case you were wondering if you saw my last two comments about this series, i gotta tell you.. if you stopped watching this series a long time ago, or if you are thinking of skipping this season (which you probably should) then just watch this episode as a stand alone
Little pig, little pig let him in…Here’s Negan, to save the season & bring this stupid show out of life support. This was the only episode worth watching. I guess these writers do have some talent. Now let’s all hope they do a better job in the next season.
This was a LONG overdue episode, and arguably the only good thing about this season. The longer the series goes on the more I am disengaging from the characters themselves. We've essentially ended up with a zombie show that isn't actually about zombies. If we're not getting the 'high stakes' zombie encounters though, we need something else to make the show engaging, and Negan's villain origin story is the perfect way to do that. I'm just upset it took them until episode 22 of this season to do it.
that was one goddamn great episode. long ago that any episode was that awesome.
Finally! The episode I've been waiting for. I wondered why it took so long to do the Negan centered episode but it was perfectly timed. You start of hating Negan for what he did to Glen and Abraham and slowly start to feel sympathy for the guy because he is being held at Alexandria for so long. He turns in to somewhat of an anti-hero when he goes after the Whisperers and now you hear his story and it makes me understand him better. In this world there aren't just bad or good guys anymore. All of our beloved characters killed, Rick at some point turned very dark too.
Having Hilarie Burton portray Lucille was a golden move. The chemistry between Negan and Lucille really came across. It's so clear now that Negan wasn't always a bad guy. He was flawed, made mistakes but in the end he also suffered a great loss and snapped. By telling his story at this point in the story the feeling of empathy I got for him felt right. If they showed us his story right after Glen it would've felt forced... forced to feel something when he just killed one of our own. Also, the ending, perfect... Having him stroll back into Alexandria, cocky as he is but there is also this lighter, softer vibe about him now that he's got his own closure. He feels reborn.. again.
Really nice that they got Jeffrey Dean Morgan's real-life wife Hilarie Burton Morgan to play Lucille. I thoroughly enjoyed the episode.
They should have had Neegan die while saving Alexandria. Then Maggie comes back and struggles with not being able to exact her revenge. Now they will make Maggie out to be a murderer or... Forgiveness because she is the better person. Never mind the fact that this monster tortured and killed dozens of people.
At least they had an episode left like this one in them. One of the best of the show. Hope to see more of Negan in season 11. And at least thanks for making this season end on a high note because the road to this episode has been long and boring.
Sad part is Rick took the show with him....
Bc after it was never the same ... :/
Awesome to know the whole story on Negan and Lucille, they just took too much time to do this and I feel like covid made them do this nevertheless pretty awesome episode. Makes you think about how thin the line between a good person and an evil person is. Please covid go away ty bye bye
The best episode for this season!!!!
Who would have thought they would cut off Negan's balls even more.... Not me..... NUHUH I would NEVER have guessed.
Shout by NiquarlBlockedParent2021-04-06T02:23:34Z
Without a doubt the best episode of TWD in a long time. I've always been split on my appreciation of Negan, the actor is really good but has gotten some shitty scenes in the past to work with. This was actually quite good and I'm hoping for more in the vein of this. Seriously, the other "extra" episodes were really miserable and not worth watching, and even if you can completely skip this one, this one is worth a watch.