Tonight’s episode depicts the pre-Apocalypse Negan - who would become a bat-wielding pseudo-cult leader - as a mostly benign screw-up who lost his job as a high-school gym teacher after a bar fight over his beloved wife, Lucille (played by Morgan’s real-life wife, Hilarie Burton-Morgan). But if you’re a person who mostly judges by safety and security, he did keep a lot of people safe for a long time.” You could say a lot of people were oppressed under that system. “He had been the leader of this giant community and had his own set of rules and in certain ways, they worked well. “‘Am I going to have my past hanging around me forever? Do I deserve that? Can I integrate with these people? Do I want to? What is the right way to put the world together?’ “Negan is trying to find his place in society in general, and that goes through multiple stages,” she says. As its penultimate season concludes with “Here’s Negan” on Sunday, delivering the origin story of the series’ bogeyman played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan, showrunner Angela Kang is pondering how such a person might fit at the top of that pyramid - self-actualization or in “The Walking Dead’s” case, a sustainable, just civilization.

First, the survivors addressed physiological imperatives such as hunger, then security, then cemented the bonds of belongingness. The following contains spoilers from tonight’s episode of “The Walking Dead,” “Here’s Negan.”ĪMC’s “The Walking Dead” has been a treacherous climb up a gory pyramid: The zombie-apocalypse version of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

Walking dead season 10 finale