Negan, monologue, monologue, commercial, Rick, hatchet,
zombies, fog, commercial, flashback to the very recent past. Is it Glenn? Is it
Glenn? No, it looks like it’s Abraham who got a barbed wire bat to the head …
wait … no, it’s Glenn after all.
I had heard rumors very recently that two characters would
die on the season premier of The Walking
Dead. (I barely thought about the cliffhanger over the summer, which was
probably the opposite of what the show intended.) It was a pretty good fakeout
since we had been conditioned to think Negan would only execute one person but nobody
ever said there couldn’t be two deaths. The show pretty much had to kill a core
character if this whole thing were to mean anything. Who else were they gonna
killed, Marianne or whatever her name is? Who would have cared?
Meh. I’m pretty much immune to the deaths on this show at
this point. After all, it is called The
Walking Dead and there’s been so much death that I’m numb. I guess it’s a
shame to lose an original cast member but it’s season seven. We’ve had plenty
of moments.
That eye bulging out of Glenn’s ruined skull while he choked
out his last words to Maggie was rough to watch. I had been hard on the cast on
stabbing a bunch of sleeping people in the face but at least that was painless.
What Negan did was torture. I guess that makes it appropriate that the show
tortured the audience as well as the cast. At least Jeffrey Dean Morgan is
engaging (I laughed out loud when he told (P)Rick, “It’s a brand new day”) so
that helped in an episode that was basically one long Negan monologue.
Rick is pretty much broken, after Negan nearly forced him to
chop his son’s arm off (the son who had an impressive growth spurt overnight).
This is like Abraham nearly killing Isaac to prove his love to God, only the
Old Testament God didn’t carry a bat wrapped in barbed wire.
Horror can be upsetting but still fun, as we can scream and
laugh about the screaming we did. The execution of two cast members and the
near-dismemberment of a child cross the line into torture porn, something I
have no interest in. I’ll stick with my Sunday night viewings but the premier
was just a miserable experience. I am hoping this won’t be the new tone of the
season.
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