Acid

7.8/10. Most people know the bible story of when God tested Abraham. It’s one of those biblical references that just filters through the popular consciousness even if you can’t remember the last time you cracked open Genesis. The Good Lord tells Abraham, his devoted servant, to prove his devotion by offering his son, Isaac, as a sacrifice. Abraham follows this command, building an altar, tying his son to it, and raising his knife in the air to do the grisly deed himself. Then, God stops Abraham, explains that it was simply a test of his devotion, and provides a ram to be sacrificed instead.

I can remember hearing this story in Sunday school, and how the rabbi would milk this moment a bit. Keeping second graders enthralled in bible stories isn’t necessarily easy work, but he knew how to draw out the details, embellish a little at the margins, and create a great deal of suspense. Even if you’d heard the rabbi tell this story half-a-dozen times before, he made you believe that maybe, this time, it would be too late, that Abraham would act and all would be lost. In short, he knew how to build the suspense.

And that’s a sizable chunk of what The Walking Dead’s season premiere is – an exercise in building suspense. After the minor audience revolt at the cliffhanger that TWD left us with in the Season 6 finale, “The Day Will Come When You Won't Be” takes its sweet time in revealing who met the sharp end of Negan’s bat.

Instead, we just see a pile of brains and viscera splayed out on the dirt as Rick is drawn away by Negan. The show teases us as Rick is sent of a Saw-esque quest to retrieve his axe in a horde of zombies by his captor, and in the midst of this adventure, has flashbacks of all of the people around that circle, brought to their knees by The Saviors. It gives the audience a mini-recap, a brief reminder of all the people who might be the one done in by Negan in “Last Day on Earth.”

It’s a little too cute by half. To some extent, you have to fight the people who are, understandably, a bit disgruntled with the show, apt to tune in just to get closure on the cliffhanger, and then return to the rest of their lives, zombie-free. TWD fights this by basically putting that reveal in the middle of the episode, forcing anyone watching (or at least watching without the benefit of fast-forward) to witness Rick’s emotional arc in the first half of the episode before finding out the answer to the show’s whodunit.

And that arc is pretty good! (Albeit a bit trite.) The big question that the episode tries to answer is this – why would Rick, why would anyone, work for Negan? Why would our semi-noble, resourceful heroes, throw their lots in with this fiend instead of stand up to him? The answer the show offers is a simple one, one that lines up with the explanation offered by its network sibling. Rick, who is devastated at having lost one of the first people to help him and another friend and ally who told him that the world needs more people like him, does not give into despair or to hopelessness with the idea that by following this man’s orders, he can keep the people close to him from having to share the same fate. It’s a horrid compromise, but a necessary one to keep his friends and his family safe.

That is, as is par for the course for The Walking Dead, dramatized in a way that doesn’t make much sense, but is awfully nice to look at. The action as Rick is surrounded by zombies, brain-addled by what he’s been through, and being goaded by Negan throughout has the rhythms of some bizarre dance. Surrounded by fog, isolated in a sea of grasping, groping hands, Rick lies prone but eventually fights for his life. For all of TWD’s flaws, it knows how to do these set pieces well. And having Rick dangling while holding onto a dead man trying to kill him on the one hand, but which keeps him from the hungry mouths below, is a little too on-the-nose in terms of symbolism, but makes for a cool visual, even if Negan’s eleventh hour save comes too conveniently, as with most of the hairier zombie-related situations on this show.

But it’s really Negan’s episode. Jeffrey Dean Morgan gets the “And ______” credit in the opening credits, and he earns it here, offering ninety percent of the episode’s dialogue. That dialogue isn’t exactly crackling, devolving into Bond Villain-esque clichés at various points, but Morgan (the actor, not the bow-wielding pacifist, who along with Carol, doesn’t appear in the episode) saves as much of it as possible. While there’s a few odd quirks that took me out of the moment here and there (his little kissing noise for one), Morgan is clearly having the time of life going full magnificent bastard here. He leers and mocks and preens and generally chews the scenery with a presence and authority that the show seemed to be shooting for with The Governor but never really achieved.

As much as the Season 6 finale was Negan’s introduction, the Season 7 premiere is his coming out party, a chance to show that he’s not just another in a long line of underwhelming big bads on the show. The Walking Dead establishes this by not just giving him the lion’s share of dialogue here, but by establishing for the characters and for the audience that he means business by having him kill off two major characters.

The first is Abraham, who throws in one last cocky boast before bearing the brunt of the barbed-wire bat. It’s a sad end, one that traffics in the bitter irony of seeing Abraham’s journey through the Alexandria arc, of going from having trouble adjusting to the calm of life behind those walls and harboring something of a death wish, to finding a reason to hope and to want to live to see something more. It’s grist for the mills of fans and critics who contend the show is steeped in nothing but nihilism and tragedy.

But sadder yet is Glenn, whose death is one of the defter narrative moves of “The Day Will Come When You Won't Be.” After Abraham’s death, we assume the rest of the crew is safe for now, that the promise of the cliffhanger has already been delivered. That makes Glenn’s death a legitimate surprise, something that has a little more force beyond the episode’s strained attempts to stall for time before revealing who was behind the POV shot at the end of Season 6.

It’s also legitimately horrifying, both visually and emotionally. Again, the effects work on this show is never shoddy, and the image of Glenn after suffering the blow from Negan’s bat is appropriately gruesome and disturbing, a sign of how terrible the man who dealt it is. The death also has the weight of the fact that Glenn is one of the few characters left from the very beginning, after those with weaker plot armor have been winnowed away. He’s an expectant father, someone who always believed in the potential of this group, who says his wife’s name with his last breath.

He is, unlike mercurial Rick, or the pugnacious Daryl, or the deadly but complicated Carol, someone who never wavered, who represented the best of what these people could be. So there’s more symbolism when it’s his death at Negan’s hands that’s meant to send a message. It’s meant to make Negan an antagonist unlike any other the show’s offered, who represents a terrifying antidote to Glenn’s optimism and determination. That’s what Negan, and the show, is trying to impart. It’s trying to teach our heroes, and the viewers, who and what this man is. He needs to show them what he’s capable of, to show them the consequences of going against him and how futile and awful the result will be.

In short, Negan needs to break them. So when it comes time for his final act, his biggest show of force, he takes a page out of The Good Book. Not convinced that he’s fully cowed the leader of the group that’s caused him so much trouble, Negan has his goons drag Carl next to him, and orders Rick to cut off his son’s arm or The Saviors will slaughter the lot of them. He makes Rick beg him not to do it, to drive him to the point of having to make that terrible choice for the greater good, to prove his devotion, his utter submission, to the man who has made the last few hours of his life a living hell.

But Negan stops him. He forbears. He makes himself clear. Because Negan sees himself as a god, not the beneficent and kind master of all, but the vengeful, Old Testament god who wins the devotion of his followers or punishes the unfaithful. That is what Rick and his company are up against. That is why these people who thought they owned the world may cop to what this man demands of them.

They’re denied the fantasy we see at the end of the episode, a vision of almost everyone dressed in white, getting to break bread together, Glenn with his child in his arms. It’s a beautiful image, one of a paradise they may never be able to bring to pass with people like Negan lurking beyond their doorstep.

“The Lord will provide,” said Abraham to Isaac. The words can be chilling or hopeful, either a reflection of Abraham believing that his son will be the sacrifice or trusting that God would save him. Here, it’s Rick who is expected to provide, to “produce” for his new god. And that final image can also be either devastating or wonderful, a look at something Negan has ensured they will never have, or a dream that they may still one day achieve.