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The Walking Dead - Season 7 Episode 09: Rock in the Road
Negan decided to punish Rick's group for their crimes against him and used 'Lucille', a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire, to beat one of them to death. And the season premiere reveals who is on the receiving end of Lucille.
The good news is that "Rock In The Road" moves pretty briskly... there's some fresh zombie action, and no Negan to be found (save for a brief radio message). It's a welcome respite from the repetitive misery of the first half of the season.
The good news... Negan and his baseball bat were nowhere to be seen. The bad news is there were still enough plot contrivances and hokey speeches to make it uncertain the season can be saved from its showrunners, let alone Negan.
As for Negan, well, he's a no-show in this first episode, and that's fine with me. The sooner the series cuts ties with this irritating, badly written, one-note lunatic, the better.
While first impressions of this latest hour might be that not much happened, the shift toward persuasion, as opposed to brute force, represents something of a welcome respite.
Executive producer and episode director Greg Nicotero promised a "stupendous" action sequence in the premiere and boy, he wasn't kidding. Seriously, we're hard pressed to think of another sequence that comes close.
If nothing else, "Rock in the Road" was a promising start to the second half of the season, even when it felt like two or three episodes crammed into one.
"Rock in the Road," is the showrunners' attempt at watching Rick amass an army. It doesn't come about in a standard sort of way, either. But by the end, the seeds have been sewn, the bricks laid.