7x16 The First Day of the Rest of Your Life

[9.5/10] There was a hue and cry at the premiere of Season 7. Two characters we knew and cared about died, and people were undeniably upset. Some of that reaction stemmed from the mere brutality of it – the protruding eyeball and last gasps and earth stained with bloody mush. But much of it stemmed from the senselessness of the deaths – the sense in which these individuals had perished not as the culmination of their stories, but as fodder for puffing up the series’s new biggest of bads, sacrifices made on the altar of “this guy means business.”

And yet, “The First Day of Your Life” is a corrective to that. It frames the deaths of Abraham and Glenn as poetry, as symbolic of who they were and what they believed in. If the finale of The Walking Dead’s seventh season should be lauded for anything, it’s recontextualizing those deaths, making them part of a noble struggle, the nobility of which emanates from the two kind, honorable men who gave their lives in it.

It presents Sasha’s sacrifice as of a piece with the mindset Abraham reiterated before his fateful trip through the forest. Even apart from the season-ending fireworks, this was the strongest part of “First Day.” Every once in a while the show gets arty, and the quick, disorienting cuts between Sasha in what was revealed to be a coffin, her face-to-face with Negan ahead of his confrontation with Alexandria, a moment watching the sunrise with Maggie, and most importantly, her last conversation with Abraham, help represent the jumbled thoughts running through her mind as she makes a brave, incredible choice in that spirit. The form serves the function – teasing the audience a bit as we puzzle over what’s happening, but allowing the pieces to fall into place gradually until it’s clear not only where this is going, but why.

Why is the more important question. It’s a thrilling moment when Negan cracks open the coffin and a zombified Sasha lurches out and attacks him, but on its own, that could be what The Walking Dead’s critics accuse the show us – empty twists and emptier violence. Instead, it’s steeped in notions of sacrifice, of the knowledge that the capable people in this broken world know that every day they may face their ends. Every day they go beyond the protective walls of their own camps, they open themselves up to hurt, to harm, to death.

But Abraham voices the theme that the show has been baking into every episode, particularly those in the build-up to the climax – that they do it to fight for the future. Death is inevitable, in safe comfortable societies as well as in dangerous, lawless ones. All we can do is try to make our lives, and our deaths, meaningful, that if we perish, we do so in service of helping someone else, in making sure that the promise of a brighter tomorrow survives even if we don’t. That is what bubbles in Sasha’s mind as she takes her last trip, her last moments in this world.

That sacrifice kicks off the real action of the episode, the one it seems like we’ve been building to for a whole season. It is mostly satisfying, if pulpy and full of the typical conveniences of all the characters we care about (save for Sasha, obviously) making it out alive. There is the fog of war, the unexpected twists and turns amid the battle, and individual scraps that make up the larger whole.

“First Day” does well to inject enough uncertainty into the proceedings to make the conflict more than the show playing out the string. The inevitable result of all the posturing from the back half of Season 7 was the groups coming together to fight Negan. But the episode does two things that make this fight something other than a foregone conclusion.

The first is the betrayal of the “Garbage People.” It wasn’t entirely unexpected, given the pregnant tone when Michonne’s Junkyardigan counterpart suspiciously said she’d head to the next vantage point, but it immediately made our heroes feel at a disadvantage. This threw a giant monkey wrench into their plans, and contributed to the sense that no matter how Rick & Co. scrapped and scraped, Negan was always going to be one step ahead.

The second is that “First Day” spends more than just a moment making it seem like all is lost. Sure, even when cornered, the good guys fight back, but Michonne is in a brutal fist-fight; after one brief, seemingly successful fist-fight, Rick and Carl see their people lying in the streets or rounded up by The Saviors. Negan has time for one more big speech, one more opportunity to rub in the fact that while he plays the clown, he is as serious as a heart attack. It is heart-wrenching, and veers toward the sort of bleak hopelessness that the show is often tarred with.

And then, a freaking tiger attacks, and even overthinking critics like myself are not immune to the heartening qualities of the cavalry arriving. Maggie and The Hilltoppers on the one hand, Carol, Morgan and The Kingdom on the other, bursting in to save the day when it seems like things are at their darkest. It is not the mortal blow to Negan that one might have hoped for, but it is the culmination of the reciprocal idea The Walking Dead has explored this season – the notion that people can come together, can sacrifice, and achieve a greater good.

Season 7 of The Walking Dead has, in the real world, been a tough one for the show. Fans erupted in disapprobation after the premiere. Critics have been less than kind to a series that many (not unreasonably) they had never warmed to in the first place. And most importantly of all when it comes to whether and how the show continues, its ratings have continued to fall.

The irony is that for a show that has been incredibly inconsistent from the start, for one slammed for its lack of diversity, for one accused of bleakness and nihilism, its most derided season is also likely to be it’s best. This year saw the show at its most consistent in terms of quality and focused in its goals and characters. It saw episode after episode founded on the struggles of women and POC, and anchored the heart of the show around touching, meaningful, interracial relationships. It offered the most hopeful perspective yet, with characters repeatedly affirming that they will fight for the future, that they are the ones who live, that kindness and altruism are possible even in such harsh environs.

And it centers that last idea on dearly departed Glenn, a soon-to-be father who may be gone, but whose child will, with any luck, live to see a brighter future. “First Day” lets the thread start to dwindle, let’s the audience believe that perhaps we will see a repeat of the events of the premiere with our heroes on their knees and Negan swinging his barbed wire bat.

Instead, friends and allies dive into the fray when they don’t have to. People will risk their safety, risk their health, risk their own life for the sake of others. That started with Glenn, with his simple act of helping Rick when he had no reason to other than kindness. It is an affirmation that the show’s mission statement is not an endless series of grinding deaths – that it is the ideas put forward into the world that survive us, the moments of self-sacrifice that live on long after we are feeding the daffodils. It is the spirit of living for others, and dying for them too, that persists in a world where self-interest becomes all the easier and more mortal a proposition.

It is, in short, a testament to what Abraham and Glenn lived for, and not just what they died for. It is a spirit that lived on in Sasha, that finds strength in Maggie, that animates Rick and Michonne and Carl and the rest of the found family that congregates in Alexandria at the end of the episode. It is a cliché to say that these two people, that brave, bold individuals like Sasha, are gone but not forgotten. But it speaks a truth that softens the sting of those horrifying blows in Negan’s circle, and which tugs on the heartstrings as Maggie holds Glenn’s watch in the final image of the season. When the world falls, when the dark-hearted claim dominion, when the path of least resistance is to want and take and harm for your own good, there are still people who will do no harm, who will still bring light unto the world, a light that shines and inspires and heartens, no matter if or how they themselves were extinguished.