Negan Is Back In The Walking Dead: Dead City, But He Isn't The Same

This post contains spoilers for the premiere of "The Walking Dead: Dead City."

When one-time enemies Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) and Maggie (Lauren Cohan) reunite in the premiere episode of "The Walking Dead: Dead City," something's different about the guy who once beat Maggie's husband Glenn (Steven Yeun) to death with a baseball bat. Two years after the conclusion of "The Walking Dead," Negan's previously pregnant wife, Annie (Medina Senghore), is nowhere to be found, but he does have a much older kid named Ginny (Mahina Napoleon) in tow. He's also, dare I say, kind of nice sometimes?

Morgan spoke with Newsweek about the return of Negan, and while he didn't explain where Annie went, he summed up the intervening years pretty succinctly: "Since we've last seen him, he's not doing great." In the premiere episode, Negan is missing much of his typical bravado — he seems tired and understandably wary of Maggie. Still, Morgan promises that Negan will end up back to his old tricks at one point or another, telling the outlet, "Some of the old Negan is back; he's a showman and not afraid of violence." Negan's cocky shows of force might actually be helpful in this case, as the show follows the pair as they try to recover Maggie's son from a disturbing torturer named The Croat (Željko Ivanek).

Negan certainly went through some character evolutions during the original series' run, beginning the show as its most-loathed figure and ending it with, at the very least, a good backstory and a sincere apology. "The Walking Dead: Dead City," though, could afford the character even more room to grow, since its focus is squarely on two characters instead of a vast ensemble. "We've done a deep dive into both Maggie and Negan that we were never able to do before," Jeffrey Dean Morgan told Decider, "and to do that in this new environment [...] it's a great jumping-off point for a new show."

In the show's six-episode first season (the Decider interview hints there could be more, though the series was first announced as a limited series), that deep dive will apparently involve cluing us into more of Negan's backstory. The character's pre-apocalypse life was already memorably explored in a season 10 episode of the flagship series, in which we learned that his baseball bat Lucille was named after a real person (his wife, who died in upsetting circumstances years earlier). Still, Morgan told Newsweek fans will "learn a little bit more about Negan's life pre-'Walking Dead'" in the new series, something the premiere episode didn't yet hint towards.

According to Jeffrey Dean Morgan, it was vital to him that the new series not portray his character as an oversimplified bad guy or a static character. "What was most important to me was that he wasn't one note," he shared. "It would have been easy to be that same guy. How can we show other sides? A villain that's interesting is [one] you can understand why he became a villain." The premiere episode certainly tries extra hard to humanize Negan, showing him being super kind to his kid companion, giving him room to tell a story about his bad dad, and even letting him get a dig in at Maggie about how she's killed husbands and fathers, too. At this point, the show seems to be pushing the redemption angle a bit too hard, but it could still settle into a good rhythm over the coming episodes.

Negan might seem a little more deferential than usual this time around, but he hasn't lost any of his bad-guy cool. Morgan told Decider that one of the coolest movies of all time, "Escape From New York," was a reference point for showrunner Eli Jorné. If Negan seems like he'd be a natural wearing an eye patch and a tough guy scowl, there's a reason for that: "There are Easter eggs throughout the series for those movies in particular. I loved it because it gives me some Snake Plissken all day, every day."

"The Walking Dead: Dead City" airs Sundays at 9pm ET on AMC and AMC+.