For walking dead fans, 2016 has been a year of traumatizing deaths, overwhelming sadness, and ridiculous amounts of blood shed, and that was just episode one. We watched one of the most well written and developed characters have his head smashed to pieces by what is probably the scariest character written into existence.

Negan graced our screens at the end of season six and from there we could see his menacing charm. While every fiber of my being despises him for what he has done, I cannot argue with the fact that this is one of the most well written villains I have seen on the show to date. The writers were probably hoping this would distract us from the other complete nonsense happening though.

I understand we are in an apocalypse and that people are going to be separated, but it has become too much. We first started to see this problem with Carol running off to the land of the bizarre King Ezekiel. She cast herself away from everyone, refusing help form anyone at some points. I can see why she has reason to be upset and why she would act out, but it has gone too far. We can also see hints now that they are about to push a relationship between her and King Ezekiel. Now the fact that I had become emotionally attached to an unhealthy extent to Carol and Daryl could possibly be why I am so against her being with Ezekiel, but I do not think that it all. If they are going to have her work out all of these problems away from the group, let her do it on her own. Give us the strong badass Carol we have come to love. One of the laziest things I believe you can do in writing with a female character trying to base her importance on a male role.

We are all way too attached to the entire group now not to care about what is happening to them, but I am tired of them stretching out the whole season into episodes following characters dispersed throughout the region. As I said before, Daryl is a very important character to me, but so many things in his episode “The Cell” were confusing. The Savior who tried killing him before, Dwight, all of a sudden becomes very real with Daryl and you can feel that they almost want to to sympathize for him. This is extremely ridiculous considering all that he has done and how he treats Daryl’s group in the very next episode.

I do believe the episode focused on Daryl was necessary though, unlike a complete episode about Maggie/Sasha and Tara. It feels like everything is just being drug out until they can figure out what to do about Negan. While I am sure the writers have a complete plan for what is going down, I am still concerned about how season seven will continue.