I'm Just Gonna Say It!

Now, hear me out on this! I know I'm going to be in trouble after posting this. Big trouble! As in, if-you-see-this-guy-at-the-door-of-the-comic-con-don't-let-him-in kind of trouble. I know what I'm risking, here. My nerd cred is dangling by a thread, but my commitment to the truth of my nerdiness (nerditude?) is far too strong to just let this alone.

I am a HUGE Jeffrey Dean Morgan fan. I really am. And just like everyone else, when Negan first appeared on The Walking Dead series, I was pretty excited. Well, equal parts excited and worried. Excited because I had heard that this guy was the quintessential big bad of the comics, which, in the interest of full disclosure, I have to admit I've never read, and nervous because I knew that someone was gonna buy the proverbial farm.

After the big debut of Lucille, just like any other fan, I think my nerves and emotions were pretty much ground-up cat food. And in my, "I'm gonna fix dis" brain, I had concocted some very strong theories as to why that particular scene wouldn't work.

I kept it to myself. At least, I tried to (my family can attest to my failure at home, but I digress). I figured that my emotional attachment to the characters he'd taken of the count may have spurred my theories and made them spin off the rails and that if I reconsidered them after the emotions had calmed down, I'd see that they were flawed. I even gave it a whole season!

Nope.

Walk with me down Memory Lane for a moment, back to that fateful night. In a vain attempt to get a sickly Maggie to safety, Rick and company are corralled and forced to kneel under the light of a dozen torches in front of a leather clad Cheshire Cat with a baseball bat named Negan, and after what seemed like an eternity of yadda-yadda-yadda, he savagely splits the dome-pieces of the ginger truck driver Abraham, and my personal spirit animal, Glenn.

For the sake of the TWD OGs as well as the newbies, I'm going to remind everyone of some basic Walker 101 in the slim hopes that, even if you can't see things my way, you'll at least give me a nod for thinking outside the pudding can.

Walkers are attracted to:

1. Light (the kind that torches might put out into the dark of night.)
2. Loud noises (i.e. dozens of people, as many as 75 by some estimations I've seen, bird-whistling signals to each other like an Alfred Hitchcock nightmare, running one's mouth like a never-ending chainsaw and screaming things like "I will SHUT! THAT! (BLEEP)! DOWN! NO exceptions!" followed by the subsequent screams of Rick and the survivors as Negan turns Abraham and Glenn's respective noggins into chowder)
3. The smell of the living (i.e. a large mass of sweaty, stinky folks, some of which are bleeding, all scrunched together in an outdoor campsite the size of a small interstate rest stop)

Now, we know that there are Walkers all throughout that forest because 1. we saw the good guys (and, yes, they ARE the good guys) dispatch a few of the things while they were schleppin' poor Maggie through the trees; 2. Negan drives Rick a couple blocks up the road to play Fetch-Me-My-Axe-Rick against a metric butt-load of the things; and 3. after the sun finally and mercifully rises and the ironically-named Saviors saddle up and roll out, and before the dust even settles, one shambles on screen and begins to chow down on the aforementioned "chowder" right there in front of Rick.

So, there ya have it. Negan broke the rules. ALL of them. Too many times for me to still be able to keep suspending belief regarding his very existence. I know that this character has a lot of fans, and they would all tell me to take a flying leap at the next rolling bus tire. "He's a great villain! He's just got a super sad back story! That's why he became so evil!" they would proclaim, while burning me in effigy. But, as a writer myself, unless that stinkin' bat is magical and they're somehow going to connect this series with something out of Lord of the Rings, I just can't swallow it!

But despite myself, I still look forward to Sunday nights. Because, Ezekiel? Now there's a good character!