With Maggie making it clear she and Negan are far from done, Carol moves him to an offsite building for his own safety. But with nothing but time Negan reflects on his past…

Welcome to the monster at the end of this season. Negan, the largest character in the series, the man whose best friend is murder, is stripped naked here in a series of nested flashbacks that are going to frustrate some and fascinate others.

Me, I’m somewhere between the two. Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Hilarie Burton are fantastic as Negan and Lucille, who we first meet as a quietly terrified couple holding things together for each other. Negan’s relentless search for Lucille’s chemo therapy drugs is the sort of quixotic heroism the show is built on and Morgan does excellent work here.

But it’s as the episode goes on that you get to the meat of things. First we discover that Negan cheated on Lucille, then that he lost his job for assaulting a guy in a bar. His jacket? Bought while he was in credit card debt. His bat is given to him as an act of kindness. His trash talk? Perfected during online video gaming. Negan’s not a monster or a god. He’s a human. Selfish, stupid, cowardly and relatable. Negan is us and we, at long last, are all Negan just like he always wanted.

But the episode isn’t quite done twisting the knife. Burton’s Lucille defends her man’s meaningless assault. She hides his jacket instead of returning it. She loves and believes in him but in the end, chooses what she feels is the only way out; suicide. That choice is as tragic as it is understandable but when looked at with their relationship it becomes clear that Negan was built wrong from the start. No wonder he names the bat Lucille, an instrument not only of his violent redemption but a chance to wrap his love in barbed wire and carry it everywhere, a blood and gristle soaked standard to him, a sign of horror to others.

All this is good, tragic stuff and Morgan is ably supported by Miles Mussenden as the doctor who aids him and Rodney Rowland of Space: Above and Beyond as one of his first victims. The former shows Negan kindness and how little it gets you. The second baptises him. Morgan has rarely, if ever, been better than the calm, even jovial speech he delivers to Rowland’s terrified character, one part good ole boy, one part Southern blood and thunder and none of the blood is Negan’s.

In the end, what we, and he, are left with is context. Negan sees how little the first two phases of his life have mattered to anyone and returns to the main settlement, presumably to await Maggie’s judgment. His bat is burnt, his armour is down. The man he was, and the man he became are both dead. Only time will tell if the man he is now will have more success. It’s a brave move for the character and one that closes this season on a gentle, introspective note. But perhaps that’s where we need to be, like Negan himself; on the outside, painfully aware of the flaws in everything and trusting we can go and find them.

Verdict: Hard to love, but impossible to ignore; this isn’t an easy episode to love but it’s one that provides long overdue context for the show’s best known bastard. 8/10

Alasdair Stuart