Major spoilers below for The Walking Dead's TV show if you're not caught up, as well as a specific moment in the comic book.
Tonight's Walking Dead gave Sasha her own all-expenses-paid trip into The Sanctuary for some up close and personal time with Negan and his repugnant army, and her experience fell somewhere between Daryl's misery and Eugene's bliss In an overall sense. Things got particularly ugly when the "worth his weight in dogshit" Savior David attempted a sexual assault on Sasha, which was an attempt that got CUT short by Negan and his knife. The deadly sequence, along with Negan's aversion to rape, is one with a foundation within the comics, but with an interesting spin in Sasha's direction.
The Death
Up to and including this point. Sasha has served as an occasional live-action counterpart for the comics' Holly, from the relationship with Abraham to her lone ambush on The Sanctuary. That continued here, with David approaching her as a prisoner, taking all of two seconds to appear innocent before his overwhelmingly disgusting side rears its head, and it was great to see Sasha knocking that head for a loop. I bet few viewers expected to be happy to see Negan when he walked in on that sordid situation and ended it in such a neck-slicing fashion.
Unlike the comics, where the Savior was largely a background face before his death, TV David has been given several reprehensible moments upon which fans could heap their anger and need for vengeance. (If you'll recall, he creeped out Enid and beat the crap out of Aaron, among other things. So the show did manage to give this Walking Dead moment an additional layer, on top of shining a slightly less grime-covered light on Negan. Well, at least until afterward, when he just got all gross again. And not just because of all the blood all over the place. (We've got you covered on other Walking Dead deaths that were different from the page, too.)
The Aftermath
Here's where things got really interesting in terms of how the TV show flipped up the story from the comics. On the show, Negan made the surprising choice to give Sasha his knife, giving her what should have been an easy-breezy choice between stopping David's walker turn, accepting David's walker turn and succumbing to it, or using the knife on herself. She does make the decision to live on by killing ex-David, which pleases Negan to no end. But seriously, how stupid would Negan be to think that Sasha would be his right-hand woman? He's stupid in a lot of ways, and that soft-spoken speech of his was certainly convincing, but geez.
In the comic books, Robert Kirkman chose this gloriously splat-tastic moment to end the issue in question on this , and the next time we see Holly...well, let's just say that getting David's death in this episode almost definitely sets the Season 7 finale up for the first proper battle between Rick and Negan. (And it's gonna be a big one.) Because Sasha is a bigger character than Holly ever was, her story gets to continue further, and she gets those moments with Eugene. The last one, where she's behind the door and begging Eugene to give her something to use to end her life, is particularly interesting, since she was clearly just playing Eugene. He can't do anything right. (But seriously, let's not have her live out Carol's comic moments, okay?)
Next week's episode is the big Season 7 finale, during which we will likely see some more comic-specific moments creeping up on the survivors. It will hit AMC on Sunday, April 2, at 9:00 p.m. ET. Head to our midseason premiere schedule and our summer TV guide to see what'll creep up everywhere else on the small screen in the near future.
