Even though The Walking Dead will return for the rest of Season 6 on Valentine’s Day, there will be absolutely nothing romantic and lovely about the midseason premiere. (At least, unless you really love whatever characters get killed off.) We’ll still be waiting until the season finale to spend any real time with Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s big bad game-changing Negan, but it sounds like his introduction will be a bit more intense and action-packed than we thought. Here’s how Norman Reedus explained it :
There’s going to be a fight. I won’t tell you who, when and where, but I can promise you a fight. All of us are about to clash with that motherfucker. There’s a lot of turmoil in the second half of Season 6.
I love how Reedus doesn’t promise a “who,” but then says that everyone is going to clash with Negan. All I want is for Father Gabriel to step up and act like he’s got a big backbone, only for Negan to punch through his stomach and pull that jelly-like backbone out of there. But that probably won’t happen, and now I’m sad.
We obviously can’t expect to see Rick, Daryl and the rest of the Alexandrians all at once having a go at Negan when he’s by himself, as he would have to be something of a superman or a WWE superstar to survive that. But it’s definitely feasible that a gigantic brawl would occur between our central survivors and Negan’s Saviors, with the bat-wielding leader kicking stomachs and smashing skulls. Now, whether or not this fight will feature the iconic and fatal scene from the comics is anyone’s guess, but that seems like it would be a good punctuation mark to end the season on, ushering in months of fan criticisms.
By the Season 6 finale, the central characters will presumably have branched out into new areas where new characters both good and bad will enter the story, so this major fight will likely feature the deaths of people we haven’t even met yet. Hopefully everyone in the growing population makes a bigger mark than Alexandria newbs like Olivia and Denise did in the jumbled first half of Season 6.
Showrunner Scott Gimple was just talking about how much Daryl we can expect to see in the latter half of the season, and the younger Dixon sibling is definitely someone you’d want on your side when taking town a foul-mouthed barbarian like Negan. Granted, he doesn’t have his crossbow or his motorcycle anymore, but there is more than enough time for him to retrieve them by any means necessary. And if he doesn’t get them, then he’ll use that rage as his fuel. Of course, he’ll first have to survive that initial meeting with the Saviors in order to do that, but we can probably count on Daryl walking away in one piece.
Reedus told Empire that he believes Daryl’s rabid fanbase follows the character because “he’s not trying to bullshit you,” so here’s hoping Reedus is just as free from the bullshitting, and that this fight he’s teasing will indeed be one for the ages. Find out how things will play out when The Walking Dead returns to AMC on Sunday, February 14. To see when everything else is returning and premiering in the next few months, check out our midseason TV schedule.
