This past Sunday, AMC aired the last-ever episode of The Walking Dead, bringing to an end a show that has been on the air for over a decade.
That means saying goodbye to some of the main characters, including Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), who introduced himself to us back in season 6 by murdering a couple of our big players before slowly turning into something of an ally and antihero. Maggie (Lauren Cohan) has understandably had it out for Negan ever since he, uh, brutally beat her husband to death with a baseball bat. But in the finale, the two reached a kind of accord, and Maggie said she could live in the same town as Negan without trying to kill him, which is actually huge progress for them.
But it doesn’t look like Negan will take her up on the offer. “He’s not sticking around,” Morgan told Entertainment Weekly. “He’s going off to start a family and kind of start over…He has that bit to Daryl, and then he’s off. That’s it. I think that they’ve all reached an understanding. There’s been a level of acceptance with Negan, which I think has been a hard-fought battle for Negan. And of course, then he leaves. He and his wife are going off.”
Negan and Maggie will have “a hard time functioning around each other” on their Walking Dead spinoff
And that could be the end for Negan…but it’s not. He and Maggie will reunite for a spinoff called Dead City, where they travel to a zombie-infested New York City. We don’t know why, but we do know that the show is set a few years after the end of The Walking Dead, and apparently Negan has done some backsliding in the intervening years.
“Negan has an opportunity to fall into his old ways in these missing years,” Morgan told Deadline. “He is very much a creature of habit, and he knows how to survive. When he was with our group there was another way to survive, and he tried to adapt to those ways. I’m worried whatever happens in these two years away from our group, what he will become and who he will become. And so, when Maggie and he are together again, the chance that Negan isn’t who we see as when we leave him here on the show.”
"I think is a pretty good chance that he’s not going to be that guy anymore because he adapts to his surroundings and things are f***ing rough. He’s going to go back to some old habits."
We remind you at this juncture that the last time Negan indulged his “old habits,” he beat Maggie’s husband to death with a baseball bat, so whatever brings these two together, it’s not likely to be a happy reunion. “Yeah, it’s no f*cking Moonlighting at all,” Morgan joked. “Not at all.”
"These characters are going to have a hard time functioning around each other, which is why I wanted to do Dead City so much by the way. I just thought it was fascinating that you got two characters that kind of hate each other, having to find a way to work together. We saw a little bit of that last season of The Walking Dead of them having to work together, and we saw how snarky they were with each other and how short they were. And so, I think Dead City is an opportunity to take that to the Nth degree and it’ll be very interesting to see."
Jeffrey Dean Morgan still thinks it was a bad idea for AMC to announce The Walking Dead spinoffs early
Dead City will premiere in April of next year, something we’ve known for a while, since AMC revealed that the spinoff was coming before the mothership show had ended. This choice got criticized for giving away too much about who survived the finale. Morgan himself was vocal about thinking it was a bad idea, and he hasn’t changed his mind.
“ook, if you had watched the scene in the last episode of that lineup, imagine how much better that scene would have been if you thought Negan was going to die,” Morgan said. “I just think that the stakes are raised that much higher, and going into a finale episode, I think the audience if they don’t know that four of your main characters or whatever it is are doing spinoffs, you know, those are four more people that may not walk away from this.”
"I just always believe that to be the way that I would have gone. Let’s try to keep it now. Would we have been able to keep it a secret this long? Probably not, but f*ck, let’s try. Let’s give it a go. You know, I mean, look, if it leaks out, it leaks out and that’s the end of it, but that was I guess my only point. I would have liked to have kept it as a surprise."
Cohan, for her part, more or less agrees with Morgan, although she put it much more mildly: “I thought the same thing. I thought when the spinoffs were revealed, it was a little less suspense than I would have liked.”
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