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‘Walking Dead’ Producer Says Negan Will Teach Rick A Lot [Spoilers]

By Shawn Lealos
Published on: 06:16 PST, Jun 11, 2016

When the Walking Dead Season 6 finale concluded, fans exploded in anger on Twitter. The new villain Negan, played by the spectacular Jeffrey Dean Morgan, took his barbed wire baseball bat Lucille and bashed in the head of one of the show’s beloved characters. The problem is that no one saw which character it was, and there is no way of learning the truth until October when Season 7 of The Walking Dead starts.

While many fans of The Walking Dead want to know who died at the hands of Negan, many non-comic book readers want the head of Negan delivered by Rick or one of the other heroes. That won’t happen, as fans of the Walking Dead comics know. IGN reported that producer Greg Nicotero admitted that Negan will play a much more important role than that of a villain waiting for the heroes to beat him.

In some major spoilers from The Walking Dead comics, Negan is still alive and kicking a few years after making his first appearance in the pages of the books. As with the Walking Dead TV show, Negan first appeared by killing a major character that no one expected to die. Unlike the Walking Dead TV show, which didn’t show who it was, the comic ended with Negan bashing Glenn’s skull in and leaving him dead in front of the others.

Now, fans of the Walking Dead TV show would expect Rick Grimes to buckle down and make sure that Negan paid for the murder. However, in the comics, things changed, and Rick Grimes didn’t only let Negan live, but he let Negan change how he looked at the world as well. From the sound of it, that is what will happen on the TV show as well, although the person who died is still a mystery, as the Walking Dead TV show has often changed things in the books.

Walking Dead producer Greg Nicotero said that the world is drastically changing and Rick is seeing that nothing is what he envisioned. Fans who remember the beginning will see that Shane, as much as they hated him by the end, actually had a better grasp on how to survive than Rick and company did, which explains why Rick has watched his wife and many beloved friends die on The Walking Dead as he makes missteps along the way.

“The main thing about Season 7 is establishing that the world isn’t what everybody thinks it is, the world out there. At the end of Season 6, Rick was so confident. ‘We’re just going to knock out that outpost.

“It ends with him going, ‘Heh, oh well, I had no idea. What I perceived as the world is not even close to what the reality of the world is,’ and Negan’s there to show him that.”

Jeffrey Dean Morgan might be the perfect person to play Negan on the TV show. He has proven to be a pretty tough guy as the patriarch of the Winchester clan on Supernatural, but he also has proven to be a perfect bad guy in the movie adaptation of comic book favorite The Watchmen, where he played the immoral Comedian. Now, he gets to bring to life one of comic’s most evil, yet charismatic, characters in The Walking Dead.

The thing about Negan is that while he is a cold-blooded killer, he is also almost like a God to the people who follow him. In The Walking Dead Season 7, fans will get to see Negan introduced along with his followers. They will also see how Rick and company deal with it and the arrival of allies from the Kingdom. There will, of course, be a lot of zombie action as well, as Comicbook.com reported that Nicotero emphasized.

“If you have a great villain like Negan, you still have to have the walkers be present, otherwise you’re taking away one aspect of the show, and it’s an important aspect of it. So the drama is still there, and the drama basically is the interweaving of the good guys and the bad guys. It’s the cowboys and the bad guy coming into the one-horse town.”

Through it all, in this next season of The Walking Dead, it will be Negan who teaches Rick that living in this new world isn’t about being the group that attacks first — it is about being the group that is the smartest before they attack. Negan has learned how to build a community while surviving the apocalypse, while Rick has just learned how to survive. Season 7 of The Walking Dead is where Rick finally learns how to trust others and build a community as well, instead of just hitting the hardest.

[Image via AMC]

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