Next Sunday night, the season finale of Season 7 for The Walking Dead will take place and as expected, it’s the war that has been building up for the last year.
The fight to stay alive and survive is on the horizon. On one side, it’s Negan and “the Saviors,” who have built an army through their community of people and used fear and killing to overpower and take what they want.
[Doug]
On the other side, it’s Rick Grimes and his group. Rick will also likely get the help of the community known as “The Kingdom,” lead by King Ezekial, who have inherited longtime Grimes friends Carol and Morgan, the women’s group from the Oceanside that Tara stumbled upon, and the group of Jadis, another group Rick found to help by offering to trade weapons and supplies for numbers to battle Negan.
This past Sunday, we saw Negan claim another one of Rick’s group in Sasha, who seemed to be on a suicide mission in the previous episode when she infiltrated The Savior’s camp and went gun’s blazing. The episode started out with Sasha nearly being sexually assaulted by one of Negan’s members, David, but Negan himself puts a stop to it when he stuck a knife in his neck and then gave Sasha a choice: join my group or die.
She eventually accepts Negan’s offer, but in the process, she also gets Eugene, who has surrendered himself to the Saviors and Negan, to make her a poison capsule. Eugene thinks Sasha wants to kill herself by taking it, but she might have other plans with it. After all, she did bombard the camp looking to take out the group, as she was one of the many who were on their knees at the Hilltop when Negan played “eenie-meenie-miney-moe” on whose skull he was going to crack with his baseball bat and did so with Abraham and Glenn.
The mind games Negan plays with Sasha enforces his character as the show’s current villain, as while he helps Sasha from being raped in her jail cell, Negan also enforces his power when he takes back the knife that he had left Sasha to kill David when he turned into a zombie. Negan uses his cool demeanor to sweet talk Sasha into thinking she will be safe but also implies that he’s the boss and won’t hesitate to kill her if he has to. Picking Jeffrey Dean Morgan to play Negan may have been one of the better choices as far as a character goes because he portrays the Negan character so well, as he can make him the coolest guy in the room and then at the same time, flip the switch and make you hate him.
In the episode before the finale, Rick had a very anti-climatic struggle in getting the women’s group at the Oceanside to turn over their weapons because they wanted them in their fight against the Saviors. In the showdown, Rick convinces them and gains their trust when they take down a group of walkers (zombies). As they take down the zombies, Rick gains even more members to fight the Saviors, who wiped out all of the men from the women’s group in their previous community.
The final scene from the episode sees Rick and his group face to face with one of Negan’s members, Dwight, in a basement/holding cell, in which, he says he wants to help Rick take down Negan. Dwight has had issues with their group, especially Daryl, who tried to lunge at Dwight when he saw him in their building.
The last thing we all see is Rick telling Dwight to get on his knees while pointing his revolver at him, similar to how Negan told all of Rick’s group on the Hilltop to get on their knees. Given the way Rick has been through the entire series, he’s likely going to put Dwight to a test to see if he’s for real as opposed to just killing him. Despite the fact that he’s a key member of Negan’s group, Dwight also resents Negan for stealing his wife and burning his face with a hot iron, so the double-cross makes sense, but it wouldn’t be shocking to see Dwight die in the next episode, probably at the hands of Negan in some fight scene.
While some fans were hoping for an action-packed episode, this episode before the finale was definitely the calm before the storm. The finale should be an intense one and likely one filled with a massive battle and possibly the end of the feud between Negan and Rick, with Negan meeting his demise.
It’s a finale that fans have been waiting a year for, and now, they’ll have to wait at least one more week.