Thoughts on the Walking Dead to Date.

[Wyldwraith]

So, Rick and Co. have smashed face first into a relatively organized warlord's warband. I have my problems with the feasibility of fear-based leadership of an organization whose membership numbers more than 20-25, but be that as it may... Realistically speaking, I don't see Rick and whoever survives of his little band getting out of this one on their own...and Neegan's bunch are too large for someone to simply "Pull a Carol" to spring them. So...I'm guessing that a second, relatively large group is going to come into conflict with Neegan's band and Rick's bunch will benefit from the clash. Thoughts?

[JDP]

So, Rick and Co. have smashed face first into a relatively organized warlord's warband. I have my problems with the feasibility of fear-based leadership of an organization whose membership numbers more than 20-25, but be that as it may... Realistically speaking, I don't see Rick and whoever survives of his little band getting out of this one on their own...and Neegan's bunch are too large for someone to simply "Pull a Carol" to spring them. So...I'm guessing that a second, relatively large group is going to come into conflict with Neegan's band and Rick's bunch will benefit from the clash. Thoughts? Yes, very possible. The Alexandrians obviously have been outnumbered. They are in need of an ally to help them fight back this huge army of thugs.

[facestabber]

Have you not seen the previews with King Ezekiel welcoming Carol to the Kingdom?

[Moon Knight]

Since I've read the book it's kinda hard for me to speculate and offer theories, just not fair. Also, I take it you don't watch previews or trailers? Must be great to come in super clean. I don't do spoilers though but I do watch the trailers.

[katholiday]

I just keep thinking of, "The Simpsons" and how they kept adding new characters and enhancing the background of established characters. This is what I see happening here. The universe keeps expanding. True, unlike the Simpsons, The Walking Dead loses many characters... But they also add characters at a prolific rate. Also I am reminded of, James Arness', "Gunsmoke". They did NOT add a lot of new characters over their 20 year run... But a lot of desperados did meet their end in Dodge City!

[Wyldwraith]

Oh I've seen them, But there's no guarantee this King Ezekial is the man for the job. It'd be terribly convenient for one thing. Plus, wise leaders don't smash their warriors into masses of half-crazed psychopaths with too little imagination to slip a knife between the ribs of the madman bossing them around without at least a passably good reason for doing so. And no, "Because it's the right thing to do" just does not fucking cut it during the Apocalypse That said, it being manifestly established that TWD writers while conventionally good at their jobs are NOT long on imagination, likely WILL smash Ezekiel's boys into Neegan's psychopaths. I just wanted to see what the rest of you thought about the matter.

[Trin]

Here is my personal opinion, unbiased by spoilers, trailers, comic knowledge or intelligence. I'm expecting a big dose of WTF in the season. Mainly because the idea that only ONE of Team Rick is going to die in the opener really irks me. In my view, no one of Team Rick should get out alive from the opening scene. Team Rick killed an entire Savior outpost in addition to two Savior groups. They have declared war on the Saviors and established themselves as a huge threat in the process. Now they are captured. They lost. Game over. I get that Negan wants dominance over bloodshed. But what's the current score? Like 40 to 1 on casualties? So you have the entire leadership and expertise of the opponents kneeling before you and you choose to make it 40 to 2? Why would Negan let any of them live to fight another day? Why would his men, who surely lost friends in those groups, accept that slight a retaliation? Honestly, I wouldn't sleep knowing that any 2 of Abraham, Michonne or Daryl were still out there, and pissed. Now, as I said, I have no clue about anything except the idea that Negan kills one of them. I got the impression that he just sends the rest back to Alexandria, all mopey and character-developy. But maybe it plays out less stupidly than I'm imagining. If he keeps the rest prisoner to force Alexandria to submit that might work. I don't know. I'm trying to be hopeful. But TWD has been full of WTF before!

[JDP]

Here is my personal opinion, unbiased by spoilers, trailers, comic knowledge or intelligence. I'm expecting a big dose of WTF in the season. Mainly because the idea that only ONE of Team Rick is going to die in the opener really irks me. In my view, no one of Team Rick should get out alive from the opening scene. Team Rick killed an entire Savior outpost in addition to two Savior groups. Three groups, if you count Carol's massacre of the group of Saviors that was being sent to Alexandria and intercepted her (though technically she was acting on her own as an individual and not as part of the community anymore, but the Saviors don't know anything about this incident yet. They also probably haven't figured out yet who was it that blasted the group of Savior bikers to smithereens, as this took place far from Alexandria.) They have declared war on the Saviors and established themselves as a huge threat in the process. Now they are captured. They lost. Game over. I get that Negan wants dominance over bloodshed. But what's the current score? Like 40 to 1 on casualties? So you have the entire leadership and expertise of the opponents kneeling before you and you choose to make it 40 to 2? Why would Negan let any of them live to fight another day? Why would his men, who surely lost friends in those groups, accept that slight a retaliation? Honestly, I wouldn't sleep knowing that any 2 of Abraham, Michonne or Daryl were still out there, and pissed. That is realistically what should happen. That's why if I was the scriptwriters I would not have had the more important characters, like Rick, captured in this mission. The likelihood of any of the captured Alexandrians getting out alive would be nearly zero in a real world environment. The leader of the opposing faction would sentence all of them to death or, at the very least, use them as hostages to subdue the rest of the enemy without putting his own people at risk (just like The Governor tried to do when he wanted to take over the prison, but he only had two captured enemies; Negan has a bunch of them, including the very leader! The Alexandrians are for all practical purposes defeated already.) And once he has subdued all of them, he would still execute a good number of them (specially their leader) as a warning for the rest not to take up arms against him ever again.

[facestabber]

Here is my personal opinion, unbiased by spoilers, trailers, comic knowledge or intelligence. I'm expecting a big dose of WTF in the season. Mainly because the idea that only ONE of Team Rick is going to die in the opener really irks me. In my view, no one of Team Rick should get out alive from the opening scene. Team Rick killed an entire Savior outpost in addition to two Savior groups. They have declared war on the Saviors and established themselves as a huge threat in the process. Now they are captured. They lost. Game over. I get that Negan wants dominance over bloodshed. But what's the current score? Like 40 to 1 on casualties? So you have the entire leadership and expertise of the opponents kneeling before you and you choose to make it 40 to 2? Why would Negan let any of them live to fight another day? Why would his men, who surely lost friends in those groups, accept that slight a retaliation? Honestly, I wouldn't sleep knowing that any 2 of Abraham, Michonne or Daryl were still out there, and pissed. Now, as I said, I have no clue about anything except the idea that Negan kills one of them. I got the impression that he just sends the rest back to Alexandria, all mopey and character-developy. But maybe it plays out less stupidly than I'm imagining. If he keeps the rest prisoner to force Alexandria to submit that might work. I don't know. I'm trying to be hopeful. But TWD has been full of WTF before! I think key word you used is Dominance. Negan is a sociopath, pschopath, inventapath all into one. This is a game for him. Evening out the score is not his mindset. He reminds me of Kaufman from Land. Negan has a kingdom so to speak and an invisible crown to go with it. Whats a kingdom without people? Like Kaufman, people can be replaced with people. I don't think he cares who the people he controls are as long as he has control. Negan doesnt strike me as the guy whose "care" for his Saviors runs deeper than skin deep. Additionally, though less likely, maybe Negan is harnessing his inner "we must stop the killing or we lose the war". People are a valuable resource in the ZA, especially those that submit to his rule. I may be off base here, but I think people will be happy with how this episode plays out.

[Moon Knight]

Negan wants these people to pretty much work for him. Negan ain't growing a farm!

[shootemindehead]

Having read the comics, I'm not going to comment. But what happened in the comics makes perfect sense re: Negan.

[Wyldwraith]

Here's another point: Rick and Co. are talent. More importantly, by dint of their obvious emotional bonds with each other, they aren't psychopaths. If Neegan made it out of World History in High School with even a C- he damned well knows he can't hold onto power through fear and intimidation alone. He needs lieutenants. The problem is his moral blindspot. Someone like Neegan is emotionally incapable of understanding that if he kills someone Rick and Co. care about, there's NOTHING he can offer them that will ever make them trustworthy. He shows every sign of thinking everyone whose made it this far in the ZA can be bought with relatively crude coin, once he's initially whipped them to establish whose boss. This is why I'm glad my anti-social tendencies only run so deep. Thanks to a loving upbringing, my inner psycho is tempered by a dose of empathy. I understand people like the Governor, Gareth and Neegan...I just understand actual humans too. It lets me see how painfully crippled in some critical ways true sociopaths really are. They literally, neurologically cannot comprehend a notion like abiding loyalty or great self-sacrifice. They can grasp these things as emotionally incomprehensible observable behaviors in others *sometimes* if they catch the right behaviors to line up with their extensive experience at impersonating a human being...but understand something like...say Neegan killed Carl. Neegan wouldn't be able to understand a Rick that launched a blood vendetta against Neegan that was sure to result in Rick's death moments after Neegan's own. Neegan could understand revenge...but not the willingness to kamikaze onesself to get it. In a sociopath's mind there's only one real person in the world: Them. Everyone else is either Threat, Victim/Resource or Currently Undetermined as One or the Other. Another blind spot of a sociopath/psychopath willing to make a game of executing someone in front of their friends is a lack of comprehension that putting fear into a human being may work for awhile, in other words bow them, it doesn't always break them. Some people it does...some it doesn't. And it's difficult to determine which is which. I STILL maintain that the writers are contravening reality by allowing him to have amassed so many Saviors. The fractious nature of the sorts of criminality-oriented, vicious thugs many of them have been shown to be, coupled with a wide open landscape and resources just lying about to be scavenged makes it vastly more likely there would be numerous smaller gangs, rather than one super-gang. I mean look at our pre-Apocalypse world. In a major city there are literally DOZENS of gangs, and while one gang occasionally gains an advantage and wiped out a rival gang, there are two things you almost NEVER see happen. One: No One Super-Gang arises to control the criminal landscape (And don't mistake Organized Crime syndicates wiping gangs out to take control of a city's criminal landscape as the same thing. They're Apples and Oranges. I'm talking about criminal collectives operating on similar value-systems, with relatively equal numbers relative to each other, and relatively equal resources to draw upon in their competitions with each other. A Mob or Triad syndicate, or Mexican cartel operates by vastly different mechanics, with vastly superior resources.) See what I mean? Back when Neegan had fourteen guys, and encountered another very petty gang leader with twelve guys, how did he a) Not losing 3-4 of his guys (minimum) in killing the twelve, and b) At least some of the time convince other gangs to join his. It's comprehensible how he continued to grow once he reached a certain critical mass. Ie: Once there were 60 Saviors and they came upon that twelve-man strong gang, a Join Us or Die ultimatum is viable...but everything we've seen indicates that unlike the Governor, Neegan shouldn't have been ABLE to accrue that initial 60 to get the ball rolling in the first place. The kind of person who visibly gets off by grinding his boot heel into the people he's gotten the better of isn't a uniter. Isn't a coalition builder. I'm interested to see how it plays out of course. But the Saviors are as unreal, unrealistic, and as artificial a script-construct as any seen in Direct to DVD plots. I just don't see one shred of anything that points toward how this sadistic, game playing power monger got to this point. It would take some AAA-grade exposition we aren't going to get to sell this guy as believable. Now, I watch Direct to DVD stuff on occasion..so I'm willing to sit through the Savior portion of the plotline...but this isn't TWD's finest hour by ANY stretch!

[Moon Knight]

^ lol wtf. Just give the season a chance to play out. Negan is an amazing and fun character.

[Trin]

I think key word you used is Dominance. Negan is a sociopath, pschopath, inventapath all into one. This is a game for him. Evening out the score is not his mindset. He reminds me of Kaufman from Land. Negan has a kingdom so to speak and an invisible crown to go with it. Whats a kingdom without people? Like Kaufman, people can be replaced with people. I don't think he cares who the people he controls are as long as he has control. Negan doesnt strike me as the guy whose "care" for his Saviors runs deeper than skin deep. Additionally, though less likely, maybe Negan is harnessing his inner "we must stop the killing or we lose the war". People are a valuable resource in the ZA, especially those that submit to his rule. My main point is that dominance is not served by executing one and allowing the rest to leave. Wyld made some good points on the topic. If you kill ANY of them the rest will seek vengeance regardless of cost. So Negan's end game plays out worse than wiping them out or letting them all go. So, as I see it, dominance is best served through one of several choices: 1) Kill anyone that might have a spark of rebellion in them (i.e. crush them). 2) Levy some non-lethal punishment as a show of good faith and leverage that to reconcile to a position of semi-benevolent dominance. 3) Keep prisoners as hostages to assure submission from Alexandria. Realistically, there is no way the Saviors are running a police state over all the enclaves they control. So some measure of loyalty/submission has to be established without a constant threat in place. There is another possibility that comes to mind which might help me reconcile Negan's behavior against common sense. Maybe Negan is not aware of just how much of Team Rick he has captured. Or not aware of the nature/bond these people have. If he thinks of them as a random roving band of Alexandrians he might not catch that he has the future rebellion at his feet. I may be off base here, but I think people will be happy with how this episode plays out. I'm still open minded. But it's fair to say I'm not optimistic. And I'm not exactly salivating for it to start, either.

[Wyldwraith]

Then explain to me how this guy ended up heading a veritable army YEARS into the Zombie Apocalypse. What makes him amazing and fun? From where I'm sitting he's stock Psychopathic ZA Warlord-trope. He feels like a real departure from TWD's normally top-notch villain building. The Governor was three dimensional. Gareth wasn't perfect, but he fell within the bounds of believability (if at the outer edges of it). Even Dawn made a great deal of sense. Neegan just seems like a Mwahaha mustache twirler. When I see that commercial with him grinning and boasting "I'm EVERYWHERE!" It literally makes me *cringe*. You can't push people as hard and fast as he pushes. If you do something like that Rick and Co. kneeling before him and him eeny, meeney, miney-ing to decide who dies, you have to kill them ALL. The Zombie Apocalypse is already a nightmarish place to live. If you try to sell someone on living in it, AND under the boot-heel of a douchebag like Neegan they'll rebel even if they're 90% likely to get killed. Let me ask you something Moon Knight. Take you for example: You've lived through what Rick and Co. have lived through already. Would YOU spend six months to a year living under that psycho's boot trying to come up with a master plan to take him out...or would you just push back? I mean your life is already a shitfest where you have to wake up every day wondering if the day ends with you getting pulled apart and eaten alive...What kind of person beyond the most through and through of cowards cares enough about simply continuing to breathe to put up with the ZA PLUS being the serf of some sadistic warlord? The jews at Masada had no illusions about somehow defeating or repelling the Romans. They still chose to die rather than put up with Roman shit anymore. THEIR lives weren't as bad under Roman rule as Rick and Co's lives were BEFORE Neegan. What kind of parent would accept their children growing up slaves who ALSO have to worry about being eaten? I just don't get it.