Negan’s victim revealed in Walking Dead new season

Yankee mag, WGBH launch show

LOS ANGELES, Oct 24, (Agencies): Oh my! They killed Glenny!

Perhaps it’s not appropriate to greet the death of one of “The Walking Dead’s” oldest and most beloved characters with a cheap “South Park” pun, but after an episode as grotesquely gory and as cynically contrived as “They Day Will Come When You Won’t Be,” laughter is the only sane response.

As if spending half a season building to the iconic moment from the 100th issue of Robert Kirkman’s comic book when the menacing leader, Negan, smashes in a character’s head with his trusty barbed wire-wrapped baseball bat wasn’t enough, showrunner Scott M. Gimple left viewers hanging over the break between seasons as to exactly whose melon went splat — and kept it up for 20 minutes into the new season. Glenn wasn’t even the first to be introduced to the wrong end of Lucille: that was Abraham, who managed to spit out a final word of defiance before Negan turned his skull into pulp. But after Daryl lunged at Negan, he decided the submissive spirit he aimed to instill in Rick’s band of survivors needed to be underlined once more, and without warning, he split Glenn’s head as well.

On a purely mechanical level, Abraham’s death was an effective bit of misdirection: Glenn died on TV just as he does in the comic book, right down to the final image of his dislodged eye twitching in a pile of bone and meat. (The episode instantly took its place as one of, if not the, goriest in the history of television.) By killing Abraham first, the show managed to surprise even diehard fans. But it did so at a profound cost to the bond between the show’s creators and its fans. By tricking viewers into believing for several episodes in the previous season that Glenn was dead, even removing actor Steven Yeun’s name from the opening credits, Gimple and co showed they were more concerned with continually shocking their audience than keeping faith with them. Repeating that trick in reverse, making us think Glenn would survive Negan’s deadly game of “Eeny, meeny, miny, moe” until that fatal thwack, confirmed that the “The Walking Dead” isn’t taking its viewers by the hand so much as jerking us around. It’s increasingly difficult to escape the idea that this is a show that gets off on torturing its audience.

Negan wasn’t even done. First, he drove Rick way out into walker territory and made him to fight his way back to his own RV with only a hatchet to protect himself, and then he nearly forced Rick to cut off his own son’s arm with that same axe, relenting only when it became clear that Rick’s spirit had been definitively broken. During their chat in the RV, during which Rick slowly allowed himself to come to terms with what had happened — the show’s excuse for pushing the cliffhanger’s resolution back by several commercial breaks — Negan likened the deaths to Rick’s emasculation, with one body dropped for each castrating snip, and after Abraham’s death, Negan stood over his former lover, Rosita, with his glistening bat extended none-too-subtly from his hips. There’s no doubt who’s got the biggest one in town.

Maggie, who is pregnant with Glenn’s child, was the first to rise from her knees after Negan and the Saviors departed, and she was immediately determined to avenge his death. But Rick, for the first time in the show’s history, is beaten, and he knows it. Negan has an army at his disposal and he’s holding Daryl captive, but it’s not the practical details that keep Rick from rising to Maggie’s challenge. He’s held to the idea of himself as a protector since the beginning, the former country sheriff turned ruthless field commander, but that’s been ripped from him, and without it, there’s nothing left to grab onto.

With Rick speechless, at times near-catatonic, Negan had a good three-quarters of the episode’s dialogue, and Jeffrey Dean Morgan made the most of it, strutting amid the corpses with the cocky swagger of a high-school quarterback who knows he can have anyone he wants.

Also:

BOSTON: Yankee magazine and Boston’s public television station, WGBH, are teaming up to launch a new travel and lifestyles show exploring New England.

“Weekends With Yankee” is set to premiere nationwide on public television stations in April 2017.

The two media companies say filming will get underway later this month on 13 weekly half-hour episodes.

The producers say the documentary series will take viewers on “an insider’s exploration” from cities to far-flung countryside across the six-state region, which is a top destination for tourists from around the world. They say it will focus on unique attractions and “the hidden New England that only locals know.”

Emmy Award-winning TV travel host Richard Wiese will host the show, joined by Amy Traverso, a senior food editor at Dublin, New Hampshire-based Yankee.