7x07 Sing Me a Song

There’s an old chestnut that goes that the best villains are the ones who believe they’re the heroes of their own stories. That’s the question I have for Negan after “Sing Me a Song,” an episode of The Walking Dead that spends more time acquainting us with him and his fiefdom. There are times when it seems like he believes he’s doing a good thing here, bringing civilization back to an untamed world. There are others when it feels like he’s just enjoying living in his own twisted version of Disneyland. It’s unclear which version of that he really believes, or is even aware of, but that ambiguity helps make him TWD’s most interesting villain yet.

“Sing Me a Song” reaffirms Negan as a fundamentally bad person, but also one who is full of contradictions, who seems to live by various principles (or at least rationalizes that he does), but whose actions often conflict with them.

For example, one of the things we learn about Negan here is that he has an almost fanatical devotion to the rules. Those rules conveniently never result in any harm to him, but he posits himself not as some sort of tyrannical dictator, but rather as a diligent steward, simply enforcing the previously established, well-understood rules of the road. Nevermind that Negan himself very likely created those rules, or that they’re inevitably tilted in his favor, the leader of The Saviors sees himself as merely dutifully abiding by the laws that are best for everyone.

There’s social commentary in that and the idea that people in power miss the underlying inequities of systems that just so happen to benefit them, while hiding behind the notion that they’re simply following the rules, regardless of whether those rules reinforce that system. But even taken purely as text and not subtext, it becomes unclear whether Negan truly believes what he spouts to his cowed masses or not.

Because there’s times when Negan seems to buy his own lines. We finally learn the origin of the term “Saviors” as used by his group. It’s founded on the idea that they are saving civilization through their intervention. It’s not hard to imagine Negan viewing himself as the embodiment of Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, preventing anarchy and protecting the harshest realities of the state of nature by creating a threat of force to keep everyone following the law, for the benefit of all. He is, in some respects, a slanted realization of that view of the role of government, one where it holds a monopoly on the use of force, to keep people working for a collective good rather than an individual good, gone more than a little mad. That sunny side of that system is what Negan preaches to his people -- that the rules, which he is so committed to enforcing, make life better for everyone.

But it also works well as propaganda, perfectly tailored to keep people lower on the totem pole in line, either out of a fear of what happens when the rules are broken, or because they truly internalize the idea that this is the proper organization of people and civilization. So it’s hard to tell whether Negan genuinely sees himself as a benevolent leader doing what’s necessary to keep everyone safe, or if it’s a useful fiction that keeps the gravy train that works to his benefit in perpetual motion, if he even knows himself. Perhaps it’s even a little of each, with Negan believing the way of life he presents as what’s best for everyone on balance, while suitably content to gloss over the rougher edges of that philosophy to continue his life in the lap of relative luxury.

Part of what points the needle in the direction of propaganda, however, is the fact that the qualities he respects and admires run entirely contrary to his Hobbesian perspective. Negan positions himself as the ultimate enforcer, someone who represents the barbed-wire carrying arm of the law, but he has the most appreciation for and the most interest in the people who stand up to him, the ones who, in effect, break his rules.

That’s why he takes in Daryl after getting punched in the face by him, claiming that he’ll make a good soldier. And that’s why, in this episode, he starts trying to groom Carl rather than taking him out after he engineers a bold but somewhat cavalier assassination attempt against Negan. Negan respects people who aren’t afraid, who are badasses, who stand up in the face of pure, merciless force and are undeterred. He won’t tolerate it -- he can’t or, to his mind, in his rule-bound system the whole thing would fall apart -- but damnit if he doesn’t respect it.

So he is a man who both puts the rules above all else, or at least feigns that idea, whether with his rank-and-file workers or his “wives,” but gravitates toward the people who are not cowed by them, who stand up to the system he has so painstakingly and so brutally established out of the factory we see in gross for the first time.

That complexity comes through most clearly in Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s performance. I’ve talked about that aspect of Negan a bit already this season, but it bears repeating. The thing that elevates Negan from the other scores of mostly underwhelming antagonists this show has featured is not just the way the character and his dialogue are written. In other hands, Negan could easily be simply too much. (And, to be fair, sometimes he is.)

But Morgan brings a magnetism to the role, managing to cycle through what appears to be genuine joy, quickly rising anger, feigned benevolence, and slimy, chipper menace, oftentimes all within the same scene. Like the season premiere, “Sing Me a Song” frequently feels like a showcase for Morgan’s performance as Negan, letting his scenes breathe, not only to milk the tension as Negan shows Carl around, introducing him and the audience to The Savior’s headquarters, but to put the talents of the actor front and center.

Which is why, perhaps, every time we cut away from Savior HQ to check in on the other survivors out in the world, it’s not quite as compelling. But there’s a common thread the rest of those stories, something that unites the mini-plots for folks we haven’t seen in a little while thematically, even as they seem a little disjointed. They center on the people who are willing to act, the kind of people whom Negan seems to respect, even as he puts even more strictures and shows of force the tamp down on such things.

We see Michonne (in a delightful homage to The Wire) whistling as she constructs a roadblock, commandeers a car, and instructs her hostage to take her to Negan. We see Rosita browbeat Eugene into making her a bullet to the same end, arguing that he is weak and never really acts. While Rick’s and Spencer’s parts of the episode seem more like table-setting for events down the line, there’s a thematic throughline centering on the idea of who’s willing to stand up and do something, even in the face of Negan’s harshly-enforced strictures.

The result is an episode that sets up a “Who Shot Mr. Burns”-esque sort of tension around Negan. So many people have a reason and a plan to kill him. Michonne is on her way. Rosita has her bullet. Daryl is angry and now loose. Jesus has made his way into the Saviors’ compound. Carl already tried once and is at Negan’s side. Dwight is forced to watch Negan kiss his wife, and seems to be having second thoughts about this arrangement. And when the occasionally impulsive Rick returns to Alexandria, he will see this ghoul of a man holding his young daughter. There are enough folks out there ready to get revenge, ready to stop him and all of this, that there’s intrigue in what seems like an inevitable reckoning, and the question of who will make the attempt.

But before that happens, we have to spend a little more time getting to know this man, trying to understand how he thinks. Is he, at least in his own mind, a hero? At times, he seems to think so. He’s not shy about the fact that this new order has been good to him, but when he makes his little pitch to Carl, he talks about remaking the world, making it better. Negan is a man who takes what he wants, but who puts on the airs of respectability, who justifies his particular brand of feudalism as some kind of justice, some manner of improvement on the way things used to be.

Still he toys with people. It’s unclear whether what appear to be occasional moments of compassion or restraint from him are legitimate, calculated, manipulative, or self-delusions. We know this much about Negan -- he is a terrible person, who has managed to concoct a method of organizing and taking from people that manages to sustain a miniature empire and feather his own nest, at the cost of many other people’s hard work and a great deal of bloodshed.

But what we don’t know, and the question for which “Sing Me a Song” offers many conflicting indications, is whether he knows he’s a terrible person, baldly reveling in the unchecked power and unbounded hedonism he enjoys under the pretense of good governance, or if he truly believes that he is making this new world a better place, showing kindness and mercy where he can, and only reluctantly doling out punishments to preserve the system when he must. Negan may be the tyrant with no delusions about the fig leaf he uses to legitimize his rule, or he may be a different sort of villain, the kind who genuinely thinks they’re the moral champion of the story, as a day of reckoning grows nearer and nearer.