You know the drill by now. The Walking Dead ended Season 6 with the highly anticipated introduction of the monstrous Negan, and paired that with a cliffhanger that kept the identity of Negan's first victim a secret. Fan reactions went from mildly hostile to genocidal, and conversations either revolved around boycotting future episodes or guessing who died. Many predict it was either Glenn or Abraham that got clobbered by Lucille, and I posit the best way for The Walking Dead to make up for the open-ended finale (among other things) is to kill BOTH characters off in the Season 7 premiere.
I admit that it runs against intuition to assume that killing off two major characters beloved by millions of fans will actually have a positive result, and I don't blindly believe a double dip of death would go by without an equally vocal reaction from viewers. Not that either of those factors halts my train of thought on the matter, as I cannot imagine another more sensible resolution that could follow everything we watched in Season 6. And given the fact that Steven Yeun has been AWOL from filming for a while, with Michael Cudlitz not exactly showing up to the set lately himself, it's also not that improbable an outcome.
Unlike how actual post-apocalyptic life would go, The Walking Dead is scripted with the future in mind, and both Glenn and Abraham spent a bit of time in the past season mulling over the details of their mortality and reflecting on what is still good in their lives. In ways that loosely implied something doom-worthy was on the horizon. Are we supposed to believe that Abraham coming around to the idea of wanting to start a family again is going to result in him actually starting a family again? Come on now.
The Walking Dead gave Abraham some truly excellent hero moments in Season 6, such as when he showed up with a machine gun in the nick of time to destroy walkers (saving Glenn's death-hunted ass, no less), but there were so many warning signs that horrible things lie in wait around every corner. In the premiere alone, we watched him drunkenly playing with a ring he stole from a corpse, as well taking a needless risk to kill some walkers because it was "fun." Follow that with extended introspective moments, such as the scene with Abraham and the walker hanging off of that bridge or his romantic transition from Rosita to Sasha, and a softer picture is painted of this musclebound vice-hound.
As well, Abraham escaped death in two clear situations in Season 6. One was in the midseason premiere when Abraham, Sasha and Daryl were accosted by the show's first group of Saviors; just when it looked like bullets would fly, there was that Daryl ex Machina moment with the RPG. The second death he was spared from was his comic book murder, which was passed on to the underused Denise, and there is no good reason to change that moment so drastically unless a more noteworthy execution was already planned for later.
Now we go back to that other point in Season 6 when viewers had nothing but vile and vitriol to spew, and I'm of course talking about Ye Olde Glenn's Death Fakeout. Absent for several weeks as the Internet protests wore on, Glenn returned in a way that earned the show few brownie points, and he wasn't even back for all that long before he almost moronically got himself wiped out by another batch of walkers. So while there are other moments that could be argued for, Glenn pretty much shared Abraham's dual close calls. And the third time is the (c)harm, right?
While it's great that Glenn is happy he'll be a father one day, that probably just means he'll never get to realize that hallmark. Let's not forget that Glenn is the character whom Negan kills in the comics, forever altering that storyline in many different ways. Few characters' deaths on the show would have the same kind of waterfall effect on the narrative as Glenn's, and I'm not sure that Maggie would match her comic counterpart's level of independence if Glenn was still around. Plus, Robert Kirkman previously trolled fans during an appearance on @midnight by blurting the Glenn's death spoiler long before the show was setting all that up, and he's the kind of guy who can straight-face a lie and broadly joke his way through the truth.
I don't have an exact formula for how Abraham and Glenn should die when Season 7 returns, and I'm not even married to the idea of them both happening during the opening. Maybe Negan swings Lucille down onto Glenn's skull and the fearless Abraham leaps up in rage, only to be shot or batted down soon after. Maybe Abraham makes it through the attack and gets killed later in the episode during an ill-advised mission to avenge Glenn's death after thinking about Maggie's child now growing up without a father. Maybe he finds a grenade and sacrifices himself to kill a bunch of Saviors. Any way they dish it out, I'll take it, so long as there aren't any dumpsters nearby that could or could not be crawled under in a time of emergency.
While I am now hoping that Season 7 kicks off with death scenes for both Abraham and Glenn, I am in no way gullible enough to think that my own interests will be met by any TV show out there, much less this one. I'm fully ready for the episode to get here only to reveal Negan's bat is actually just an inflatable toy and that this is all one big birthday party for one of the Saviors. Gotcha!
The Walking Dead Season 7 will premiere on AMC this October. Do you guys think an Abraham/Glenn death-combo would help the show or am I just talking crazy?
