“That’s how we’ve been approaching Negan for the last arc because he has a lot of room to grow as a character. But with any villain, if you’re able to explore what’s behind the decisions they make, there are points where you can empathize or understand their thinking. “That’s not to excuse decisions he’s made, bad things he’s done. But you know, from his point of view, every villain is a hero in their own story,” says Kang. He killed beloved characters he’s brutal. “Negan is one of the biggest bad guys we’ve had on the show. Unmoored from the life he shared with Lucille, he finds he’s “capable of damn near anything" he joins the multitude of “Walking Dead” characters transformed by trauma. His desperate attempts to keep his cancer-stricken wife alive as the world falls apart form the foundation from which “Savior” Negan would rise. Even this version of Negan is no angel, though despite his love for Lucille, he cheats on her. Tonight’s episode depicts the pre-Apocalypse Negan - who would become a bat-wielding pseudo-cult leader - as a mostly benign screw-up who lost his job as a high-school gym teacher after a bar fight over his beloved wife, Lucille (played by Morgan’s real-life wife, Hilarie Burton-Morgan). Gimple and Angela Kang give us a glimpse of the franchise’s future. TV’s zombie empire plots its next moveĪs Season 10 of “The Walking Dead” wraps and new spinoff “World Beyond” premieres, Scott M. You can’t kill ‘The Walking Dead’ that easy. But if you’re a person who mostly judges by safety and security, he did keep a lot of people safe for a long time.” You could say a lot of people were oppressed under that system. “He had been the leader of this giant community and had his own set of rules and in certain ways, they worked well. “‘Am I going to have my past hanging around me forever? Do I deserve that? Can I integrate with these people? Do I want to? What is the right way to put the world together?’ “Negan is trying to find his place in society in general, and that goes through multiple stages,” she says. As its penultimate season concludes with “Here’s Negan” on Sunday, delivering the origin story of the series’ bogeyman played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan, showrunner Angela Kang is pondering how such a person might fit at the top of that pyramid - self-actualization or in “The Walking Dead’s” case, a sustainable, just civilization.
First, the survivors addressed physiological imperatives such as hunger, then security, then cemented the bonds of belongingness.
The following contains spoilers from tonight’s episode of “The Walking Dead,” “Here’s Negan.”ĪMC’s “The Walking Dead” has been a treacherous climb up a gory pyramid: The zombie-apocalypse version of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.