Negan, Ginny and Maggie reunite. Negan and Maggie have the fight she’s waited over a decade for. Everything changes.

The traditional structure for a show like this is that the big fight happens at the end. Here, it happens in the middle and it tells you everything about both the show’s intentions and its success in exploring what happens after the world ends. If The Walking Dead was a post-apocalyptic show, and there’s a case for saying the second half was not, then this round of spin-offs are all definitively post-post-apocalyptic. The world has ended. People have rebuilt. Now what?

The key to this new found ambiguity is the complexity of everyone we meet, bar one. The Croat is revealed by the end of the season to be a one-note man by name and nature. He’s a bad cover version of Negan and as far as the Dama, the maternal figure we’ve glimpsed up to now, is concerned, he’s an opening act. The Croat’s job was to get Negan to Manhattan. His job is done. He soon will be. On some level he knows that.

The other characters still standing are more nuanced but no less lucky. Negan isn’t the man he was, despite the best efforts of circumstance, but that doesn’t matter. The Dama needs him to be Negan. Maggie needs him to be the villain of her past. Ginny needs him to be a dad even though he killed her actual father. His loyalty, in the end, is to Maggie, the woman whose life he wounded but didn’t quite end. That means he has to destroy every other bond he has and Jeffrey Dean Morgan shows us just how much that hurts.

If Negan is clawing his way back to the light, Lauren Cohan’s Maggie is stepping further into darkness. The way she manipulates Negan has justification but it’s the wrong side of the street for her and she knows it. Maggie, especially in her closing scenes with Herschel, learns the damage she’s done to her own life by fixating on the moment of Glenn’s murder. It’s tragic, and understandable, and it’s killing her and her son. She’s falling, Negan’s rising and they meet in the middle, in that long overdue fight.

Looked at this way then, it makes perfect sense for the fight to be the hinge the show turns around. Maggie has wanted to kill Negan for over a decade. Maggie needs Negan to get Herschel back. Negan has known what he’s done has damned him, has spent years making amends knowing it isn’t enough and is ready. The moment he beats Maggie, drops his knife and steps away is one of a half dozen silent character beats throughout this season that tell us everything. The only person still trapped with the monster is Negan, and the monster has fans.

That makes the ending here all the more horrifying, as Maggie, Negan and Perlie all discover just how hollow their lives are. For Maggie it’s the realization not only that she’s all but lost her son trying to protect him, but that she may have radicalized him too. For Negan, downing that drink he’s gifted, it’s the realization that in order to keep people he owes a life debt to alive he must become the monster that maimed their lives again, only this time doing so consciously. For Perlie, it’s the scales being lifted from his eyes about New Babylon. Nothing in this episode is more terrifying than Perlie being asked about the methane the Croat harvests from the dead. People are resources, and the Croat and the Dama are monsters. But they’re honest monsters.

The final shot here, Maggie and Negan’s faces merging, is both a signoff and a mission statement for what’s to come. That may be conflict, or it may be alliance. But these two people are tied together and the show is brave enough to have them, and us, in doubt as to whether that will save them or damn them forever.

Verdict: A very, very strong ending for a season that with one exception, has been really impressive. 9/10

Alasdair Stuart