‘The Walking Dead’ Recap: A Whole New World

Warning: The recap for “The Day Will Come When You Won’t Be,” the Season 7 premiere episode of The Walking Dead, contains storyline and character spoilers.

“The Day Will Come When You Won’t Be” is now officially the saddest TV episode title ever. When CDC doctor Edwin Jenner said that line to Rick at the end of Season 1, he was warning Rick there would come a time when he wouldn’t be grateful to have survived the CDC building blast in which Jenner himself had opted for suicide instead of facing the horrors to be encountered in the apocalyptic world.

And after the terrifying, series-changing events of the season premiere, several members of Rick’s group might not disagree with Jenner’s decision.

The main event: Negan had promised he was about to kill a member of the group when the Season 6 finale ended last April. Instead, he killed two.

Abraham was his first victim, and as always, the former soldier maintained control of the situation — as much as one can while being beaten to death with a barbed wire-covered baseball bat — telling Negan after a brutal first blow of the bat to “Suck my nuts!”

Related: Ken Tucker Calls TWD’s Season 7 Premiere a Walking Dead for the Trump Era

As Abraham’s loved ones tried to process what they had just witnessed, Negan continued taunting them. After he figured out Rosita had been involved with Abraham, he tried to force her to look at the blood-covered Lucille. That was too much for Daryl to take, and he jumped up from the semicircle of doom and attacked Negan, landing a punch right on the baddie’s face.

That meant he would pay, of course, but because Negan’s mind works in the sickest ways possible, he didn’t dish out Daryl’s punishment to Daryl. He turned Lucille on Glenn, hitting him so hard that his eye popped out of its socket. As Maggie looked on, Glenn tried to speak to her, but his brains had been scrambled. The final thing he was able to tell her: “I’ll find you,” a promise to be with her, look after her, no matter what was about to happen.

And what was about to happen was that Negan was going to continue pounding Lucille into Glenn’s noggin until it was no longer recognizable as a human head.

The fallout of the deaths, and the episode-long torture of Rick by Negan, continued, and will continue, for the rest of this season and beyond.

In the premiere, Negan’s goal was to break Rick, and not just by killing his friends and making him believe he was willing to kill the rest. Negan dragged Rick to the group’s RV and tossed him inside, setting off on a wild ride that included a stop to throw Rick into a group of walkers. As Rick fended off the walkers via hand-to-hand combat and climbed to the safety of the RV roof, he had a brief moment to stop and process what had just happened. It was during this point of the episode we saw the deaths happen in flashback.

But Rick’s reprieve — if you consider it that, since it was really just the first time he could stop and relive phase one of Negan’s dismantling of his confidence — was short, as Negan began firing his gun into the ceiling from inside the RV. Rick had to run off the back of the vehicle to avoid the gunfire, jumping and latching on to the body of a walker hanging from a bridge (the zombified version of the guy Rick’s group saw the Saviors hang in the Season 6 finale).

That was yet another moment of terror for Rick, as his weight and gravity began to pull the walker’s body apart from its neck. Negan, again to prolong Rick’s torture more than to definitely save him, shot the waiting walkers below, so they’d make a pile for Rick to land on when Hanging Walker literally fell apart.

Rick got up and made his way to the RV door, only to find it locked. Negan finally let him in, so he could deliver a lecture about how Rick needs to start facing a new reality.

“You were in charge … you were probably addicted to it,” Negan tells him, in a not inaccurate assessment of many moments during the Ricktatorship. “And now, well … that’s over.”

What’s not over: Negan’s mind games. He drove Rick back to the death site and told him he still didn’t feel like Rick had internalized the new order of their world. Rick was still looking at him in a disturbing way — “like, I s–t in your scrambled eggs,” Negan said — too much like the Rick who had, immediately after Abe’s and Glenn’s deaths, told Negan, “I’m gonna kill you. Not today, not tomorrow, but I’m gonna to kill you” (a line taken directly from the graphic novel version of this storyline, by the way).

So Negan unspooled his next trick: He told Rick he had to chop Carl’s arm off (nice fake-out by the writers in hinting with the prominent use of the hatchet throughout the episode that Rick would lose his hand, as the character does in the comics). Negan had a doctor who could — probably, he said — save Carl afterward, but if Rick didn’t agree to chop off his son’s arm, Negan promised he’d kill everyone else in the group, including Carl, and keep Rick alive for a few years so he could “stew” about his losses.

Rick — who just a short time ago had been at the height of his confidence as a leader after defeating the Season 6 premiere flood of quarry walkers, having most of his loved ones survive the attack by the Wolves, making a lucrative deal with Gregory at the Hilltop, and beginning a relationship with Michonne — was, at last, so broken, so completely shattered by what Negan had done and forecasted he would do, that he picked up the ax and appeared ready to amputate Carl’s arm. At that moment, Negan called it off, and made a sobbing, pleading Rick agree that he belongs to Negan now, would provide for Negan now. Negan had drawn from Rick the look he wanted to see: pure fear.

Rick agreed to Negan’s demand that the Alexandrians be prepared to give him and the Saviors half their stuff when he comes a-knocking at their gate in a week. As the Saviors left — taking Daryl hostage and threatening to send him back to Rick piece by piece if he doesn’t do as Negan says — Sasha agrees to help get Maggie to the Hilltop to see the doctor, and everyone else will return to Alexandria. After they help Sasha and Maggie pick up the remains of Abraham and Glenn, leaving at the spot nothing but two giant circles of blood and any chance that, at least for the foreseeable future, any of the Grimes gang will feel like they are in control of their existence in Negan’s new world order.

Zombie Bites:

* In the comics, and even during our introduction to him in the Season 6 finale, Negan has been a sociopathic but charming dude, and the casting of Jeffrey Dean Morgan in the role made it seem possible that the character would continue to come off the way, even though we knew he would be doing some horrible things to our favorite characters. But given how devastating, how graphic the deaths of Abe and Glenn were, just how completely Negan broke Rick down, will we ever be able to see Negan that way again? Seeing the character interact with Rick’s group in the comics is one thing, but to see him carry out his plans in the flesh, against the characters played by actors we’ve come to know and love, whom fans have interacted with as much as, and likely more than, fans and the stars of any other current show on TV … it is one of the many ways in which this episode has made the show feel like a very different show already.

* There are so many moments that were shocking, beyond the deaths of the characters. The sheer violence of the fatal beatings Negan administered, and the sheer joy he took in administering them, are up there. Another: When people were trying to figure out who would die by trying to guess how the blood ended up on Rick’s face, the focus was on which character was close enough to him that it might have splattered onto Rick during a blow from Lucille. But it was so much worse; the blood landed on Rick’s face when Negan flicked the bat as it was drenched in Abe’s blood.

* Daryl was already feeling responsible for Denise’s death in “Twice as Far” from last season. He is going to blame himself for Glenn’s death. How will he, or can he, bounce back from that?

* A final crushing blow: That episode-ending dinner scene, imagined by Rick, of the entire Grimes gang — with Abraham and what appeared to be a pregnant Sasha, sitting next to Glenn and Maggie and their toddler son. It’s a scene that will never be more than a dream now.

OK, Dead-heads, if you can even bring yourself to form coherent thoughts at this point, let’s hear your reactions to the season premiere: Were you shocked at who died, how they died, and that two such major, beloved characters became victims of Negan and Lucille? How do you think Rick and the group move forward now? Will the Alexandrians ever get the upper hand again? How will the events of the premiere impact their relationship with the Hilltop crew? Will Maggie and Sasha get to the Hilltop in time to save the Gleggy baby? And how long do you think Negan and the Saviors — including that weasel Dwight! — will keep Daryl?

RIP, our beloved Abe and Glenn. Your tragic deaths have changed the show forever.

The Walking Dead airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on AMC.