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.
Review by Andrew BloomVIP 9BlockedParentSpoilers2021-04-08T18:29:12Z
[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.