WARNING: The following contains spoilers for The Walking Dead Season 11, Episode 14, “The Rotten Core,” which aired Sunday, March 27 on AMC.
The Walking Dead‘s Maggie Rhee will never catch a break when it comes to Negan. Now that she has learned that Negan’s life is about to change drastically, will Maggie continue her journey to seek vengeance for the death of her husband? Can the show really develop Maggie and Negan’s hateful relationship into something just slightly tolerable? Especially since the duo are getting their own spinoff?
The entirety of Season 11 has been developing Maggie and Negan’s relationship into something sort of manageable. There’s still hate from Maggie’s point of view, but she’s trying to not let it control her life, especially with her stubborn focus on Hilltop. Negan, on the other hand, is enjoying life without risk. He continuously mocked Glenn’s death, showing no remorse or regret for his actions that hurt Rick’s group back in Season 7 and 8, and then formulated an idea that he deserves redemption because of his time spent in imprisonment and the several years that have passed since then. Since disappearing during “No Other Way,” he’s been putting in the effort to move on with his life.
In Season 11, Episode 14, a big of secret comes out: in the time since he left Maggie and Daryl’s group, Negan got married to Riverbend’s Annie and she’s pregnant with his child. This may be just as shocking as Glenn’s death. How does Maggie react to this news? Well, she doesn’t react to it verbally, but her surprised face says it all. Maggie now understands that if she goes forward with killing Negan, she’ll be doing the same thing Negan did to her and Hershel Jr.: leaving a child without a father. Poor Maggie will have to live with this hate in her heart forever.
Given that Maggie and Negan will be appearing one of many spinoffs after the main series’ end, Maggie will either have accepted Negan’s fate or continue to struggle with this moral dilemma forever. But she has every right to feel the way she does. Maggie’s story since Glenn’s death has been about vengeance, and struggling with the idea of Negan having an easier time moving on from the past when she is still stuck in it. The idea of having a child in the post-apocalyptic world seemed fantastical, especially after Lori Grimes died when giving birth to Judith. Glenn and Maggie having a child together was a sign of the world restoring itself — until Negan destroyed their family before Maggie even gave birth.
And now the cat’s out of the bag for Hershel Jr. regarding who really killed his father, and the child’s life has been ruined forever. Hershel Jr. threatens to kill Negan out of revenge, but restrains himself to protect the others from being exposed by the sound any gunshot would make. Imagine how he’ll feel when he grows older, and begins to see the privilege Negan’s child will experience that he always lacked. Not only is this Maggie’s dilemma now, but it will be Hershel Jr.’s in the future.
It will be a tough conflict for Maggie and Hershel Jr. to overcome. Maggie, being the inherently good person that she is, could never dream of destroying Annie’s life like Negan did to hers — but finding a way to cope with this injustice will be difficult. What good can come from all this is a valuable lesson for Hershel Jr., and seeing that Maggie is one of the best mothers The Walking Dead has developed, he might even turn out just a little bit better than his older comic-book counterpart.
To see Negan and Annie break the big news to Maggie, watch Season 11, Episode 14 on AMC+. New episodes of The Walking Dead air every Sunday at 9 pm ET on AMC, and are available to stream a week early on AMC+.
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