The Walking Dead took a baseball bat straight to our hearts when it closed Season 6 with its most brutal question, Who will face the bat! Badass Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) was mercilessly beating one of our lead characters to death without the show revealing who suffered the grisly fate.
The Season 7 premiere will give us all the gory details, showrunner Scott Gimple promised at New York Comic Con Saturday. A newly released sneak peek from the episode confirms at least one person is safe from the chopping block — even if it’s kind of a no-brainer.
Rick Grimes — leader of his group and arguably the man who brought Negan’s wrath down upon his makeshift family in the first place — is still in one piece in the new scene from the premiere.
Despite his obvious devastation at witnessing one of his friends being murdered right in front of him (or to his right, according to the splatter of blood on his cheek), Rick still has enough grit left to promise that he’s going to kill Negan for what he’s done.
It’s a scene straight out of the pages of Robert Kirkman’s comic, with Negan waving his bloodied bat, Lucille, right under Rick’s nose and looking altogether unconcerned as Rick promises, “Not today, not tomorrow, but I’m gonna kill you.”
Negan assesses Rick before asking his “right hand man,” Simon, what kind of weapon Rick was carrying when he was captured — turns out it was an axe. Negan asks Rick if he has his own right hand man, “maybe one of these fine people still breathing?” Or maybe it’s the person that Negan just killed?
