Recap: ‘The Walking Dead’ season 6 finale ends with shocking cliffhanger

Negan, played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan, appeared in the final episode after a long build-up.

Fans of the source comic book may recognize him as the villain who wields “Lucille,” a barbed baseball bat, and leader of The Saviors, a hostile gang of survivors,

For their repeated assaults on The Saviors, Rick’s (Andrew Lincoln) gang had to pay a heavy price: the life of one of their own, but no one could know who died until season 7.

In a twisted, dark game of eeny-meeny-miny-mo, Negan lined up Rick and his cohorts: Glenn (Steven Yeun), Daryl (Norman Reedus), Michonne (Danai Gurira), Abraham (Michael Cudlitz), Eugene (Josh McDermitt), Aaron (Ross Marquand), Maggie (Lauren Cohan), Carl (Chandler Riggs), Sasha (Sonequa Martin-Green), and Rosita (Christian Serratos).

He delivered Lucille’s deadly blow to one of them, just to set an example for the whole group. Just one – such had been the way of The Saviors as Negan wanted to coerce Rick’s gang into submitting to them and turning over half of their supplies.

Earlier in the episode, Rick’s group was scrambling to bring Maggie, pregnant with Glenn’s baby, from Alexandria to Hilltop to seek medical attention.

However, The Saviors had set up roadblocks, attempting to corner them. In this deadly cat-and-mouse game, Rick and company faced blockade after blockade. So Eugene suggested that the Saviors were looking for their RV, and drove it empty as a decoy.

As Rick’s group tried to take a detour through the woods, they heard whistling. Clearly, The Saviors had not fallen for the ruse.

“We invested a lot so you would know who I am and what I can do. You work for me now. You have s**t, you give it to me. That’s your job,” Negan told Rick (as quoted by Vulture)

“This is your way of life now. The more you fight back, the harder it will be. So if someone knocks on your door, you let us in. We own that door. You try to stop us, and we will knock it down.”

As Negan was about to bludgeon one of Rick’s band of survivors, the perspective shifted to the unknown victim. Screams – and Lucille’s merciless thuds – echoed, as blood streamed down the screen.

In the original comic books by Robert Kirkman, Glenn was the victim, but showrunner Scott Gimple had promised deviations from the source material. “If you have read the comics, there are a lot of moments directly out of the book when it comes to the Saviors. And then some really cool expansions of the comic story,” he told Entertainment Weekly (EW).

He added, “And some hard left turns from the comic story that do eventually wind up with a lot of very familiar small scenes from the book and big scenes from the book.”

In the post-show Talking Dead discussions, Gimple also commented about the finale, as quoted by EW: “The end of the story is what people saw. And when we reveal who was on the receiving end there, that’s going to be the start of another story.”

“The kickback effects from that, what it makes everyone into, how people react, how the world changes for everyone, that’s the next part of the story.”