The Walking Dead Fans Are Reacting To The Show’s Worst Moment In History
The Walking Dead fans are never going to let this go.
This article is more than 2 years old
Will The Walking Dead fans ever be ready to let go of Glenn and Abraham? It’s been five years since the season seven opener aired on October 23, 2016. And no, fans are definitely not ready to let go of the most horrific moment in the show’s history. They’re not over it, and they don’t want to be. On the fifth anniversary for The Day Will Come When You Won’t Be, fans took to Twitter to share their grief for the characters that are gone but not forgotten.
For The Walking Dead fans, the pain of losing Glenn and Abraham is still fresh, despite how many characters died on the show before and after this pivotal episode aired.
The Walking Dead fans are more mournful and less outraged these days. Most Twitter posts were marking the anniversary and mentioning things they missed about the characters.
When the episode with their deaths first aired, this wasn’t where fans were at. At the time, they were outraged. Season six of The Walking Dead ended with the cast of characters lined up in front of their new terrifying villain holding a bat. It left the audience with a promise that someone was going to die. Fans spent the break guessing who was going to be beaten to death with a barb wire cover bat. They thought they were prepared to see something awful when the episode aired, but they were not prepared for what actually happened. Abraham died. Glenn died. And fans filed complaints with the Federal Communications Commission claiming they’d just been traumatized by “torture porn”.
All these years later, the episode is still talked about and the wounds left by the character deaths have not healed. In fact, the death of Glenn Rhee continues to be a major issue for the plot of The Walking Dead’s finale season. Maggie, Glenn’s widow, has been forced to work with Negan, Glenn’s killer. A big question for the end of the show will be whether Negan dies and whether Maggie is the one to eventually kill him. In the five years since Glenn’s death, Negan has become a character many fans like. But would they like to see Glenn’s widow take him out? That’s a question the writers will have to decide before the end of the series.
As for that pivotal episode, Scott Gimple was the writer responsible. He has said that it wasn’t an easy one for him to write. He said that he excused himself from real life for a while and went through the trauma of writing the episode himself.
At the start of season seven, Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) needed to break Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln). After so many years of watching Rick Grimes on screen, it wasn’t going to be easy for fans to believe that Rick would simply give up control to any tyrant. Negan needed to go a long way to make it believable to The Walking Dead audiences that Rick would ever give up and stop fighting. That meant taking out Abraham (Michael Cudlitz). Then it meant a terrible and horrifying death for Glenn Rhee (Steven Yeun). To make matters worse for the audience, this actually only seemed to make Rick Grimes more determined to fight, something Negan saw. Rick didn’t stop trying to fight until he threatened his son, Carl (Chandler Riggs). For the audience, though, Glenn’s death hit in a way that the show’s team may not have been prepared for.
While many fans quit the show early on in season seven, enough fans have stayed with the series all these years later to convince AMC to produce many spinoff series. While The Walking Dead may soon be over, fans still have a Rick Grimes movie to look forward to, a Daryl and Carol spinoff series, Tales of THe walking Dead, and more.
