In last night’s premiere of The Walking Dead Season 5, Negan showed up in the episode’s final minutes. Or did he?
SPOILER ALERT: If The Walking Dead‘s Season 5 premiere “No Sanctuary” is sitting un-watched on your DVR, you might want to click off now!
The episode began with an ominous title card (“THEN”) and a flashback to Gareth and his group locked up in a train car. The viewers were only with Gareth and crew long enough to know that they were in danger before transitioning back to Rick and his group in the same kind of train car (facing the same kind of danger).
Later in the episode, Rick and his group free another prisoner with facial tattoos (this part is important) from a separate train car, but all he does is babble like a nutter and then get eaten by a zombie.
Later still, Carol heads into a gymnasium set up by the Termites as a sort of memorial with lit candles and eerie messages written in boldface on the walls (things like “NEVER AGAIN,” and “NEVER TRUST”).
There, Carol has a short (but awesome) confrontation with one of the Termites, after which said Termite rambles on about how Terminus used to be a sanctuary until some violent, psychopathic group came and really tested their whole philosophy. She implies that after a bunch of torture and rape, the Termites rose up and took back their compound. Afterwards, they shifted their philosophy toward the dog-eat-dog (literally) mindset we saw in the first couple of minutes.
Could that violent, psychopathic group be Negan’s The Saviors from the comic book? The episode’s last few minutes seemed to indicate that’s the case. After another ominous “THEN” title card, we were brought back to Gareth’s group. In this second flashback, a group of men open the train car door to take one of the women inside, and the group’s leader looks an awful lot like a specific tyrannical psycho from the comics.
He even has a bit of threatening, seemingly-important dialogue when Gareth tries to reassure his mom that everything is okay. “No, it’s not,” Negan’s lookalike replies.
Unfortunately, fans of the comic will have to wait a bit longer for one of their favorite villains to appear. Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman took to Twitter almost immediately after the episode aired to quiet the online buzz about Negan’s supposed cameo.
“That was NOT Negan at the end of the episode. Note the face tattoos,” Kirkman wrote.
On Talking Dead (immediately following the premiere), special effects guy and occasional director Greg Nicotero explained the Negan-ish character in more detail:
“He’s the guy that they let out of the train car when Glenn says, ‘That’s still who we are. We have to still let those people out.’ That’s the same guy that we see in the flashback at the end. And so he’s part of the group that followed the signs to Terminus and took it over.”
So, same crazy guy who got eaten like a zombie earlier in the episode.
Since it’s still early on in Walking Dead Season 5, Negan could yet make an appearance. The Strain actor Kevin Durand said recently that he was “approached” to play the role, but didn’t offer any further details.
The preview for next week’s episode showed the character of Father Gabriel (played by The Wire‘s Seth Gilliam), so if AMC is loosely keeping pace with the comics, Terminus was a stand-in for a smaller group of cannibals from the comic, Father Gabriel is picked up on the way to Alexandria (an actual sanctuary for Rick and his team), and then Negan shows up.
It could happen by the end of Walking Dead Season 5, but Negan will more than likely be a holdover for Season 6. What did you think of last night’s premiere? Let us know after watching a sneak peek for next week’s episode below: