AMC’s The Walking Dead came swinging back onto television with its season seven premiere on Sunday, October 23.

Last spring, the show ended its sixth season with a major cliffhanger. Who did Negan, the show’s new villain, kill? The season six finale ended with a character getting whacked in the head with Negan’s barb-wired baseball bat; but it was in that character’s point of view, so no one knew who it was.

Spoilers Ahead   

Many of the fans were left angered, but another large portion of them moved on to speculate who kicked the bucket. On Sunday night, the character was revealed to be Abraham Ford, a character who’s been around since the fourth season and who fans loved for his humorous one-liners.

The premiere episode started off with Negan pulling Rick Grimes, the show’s main character, into the group’s RV and driving away. Rick was then thrown out into a large horde of walkers, which is the show’s term for “zombie.” Throughout the entire episode, Negan tried to emotionally break Rick.

While he was outside, Rick began hallucinating and experienced a flashback of what happened earlier that night. It started off with Negan choosing his victim, and the bat landed on Abraham. Fans were upset with having to watch the fan-favorite get his head bashed in, but unfortunately this wasn’t even the worst part of the episode. After Abraham was brutally murdered, Negan began intimidating Rosita Espinosa, Abraham’s ex-girlfriend, with the blood on the bat.

Before Negan could emotionally hurt Rosita even more than he already was, Daryl Dixon, an extremely popular character on the show, stepped up and punched Negan in the face. This angered Negan, and the bat-wielding tyrant had his men sit Daryl back down. This is when the worst part of this episode happened.

In order to further punish the group, since one of them stepped out of line, Negan turned around and struck Glenn Rhee, another very popular character on the show, in the head with the bat. This shocked many fans as they watched the fan-favorite struggle to get up and say his final words to Maggie Greene, his wife.

This part of the episode was the most gruesome and had the majority of the viewers in tears. The Walking Dead is based off of a graphic novel series, and in Issue #100 this exact thing happened, and it looked even more disturbing on the show than it did in the comic. After Glenn said his final words, “Maggie, I’ll find you…” Negan continued to violently bash his head in with the baseball bat.

By the end of the episode, Negan and his men took Daryl away and left Rick’s group in a catastrophic state. This was the most horrific episode of The Walking Dead yet with the loss of one of the show’s main characters, Glenn.

Glenn Rhee was viewed as the moral character of the show who still had that sense of humanity in him, and he has been on the show since the very first episode. His loss will stick with the fans and the characters for a long time and will provide an interesting story plot for the seventh season.

The many fans of the show have a variety of different opinions about how the season premiere was played out, but every fan agrees about how devastating Glenn’s death was.

Senior Monika Rostek-Kuwazaki was left saddened by the death of her favorite character and thought the episode was very intense.

“I was an emotional wreck,” said Rostek-Kuwazaki. “[Negan] is not a very nice guy. But he’s doing what is expected of the Apocalypse. He needs to show that he shouldn’t be messed around with.”

Senior Jaylen Garland was also disappointed to see Glenn die and wonders how Rick’s group will be able to deal with Negan this season.

“In the beginning… I was curious to see if the people who died were true, and when it happened, I was incredibly sad because Glenn was one of my favorite characters, and Abraham was the coolest of the group,” said Garland. “Negan is a great villain so far. I like the way he’s going. Though now whenever I see a baseball bat, I’m afraid for my life… With Negan, I don’t think this is a thing they can handle in one season. I think they’ll need two or three seasons to handle Negan.”

Physical education teacher Doug Truscott has his own opinions on the season seven premiere and thought the episode was very graphic.

“I felt like shutting it off. It was disturbing. I just thought they went in too much graphic and gory details, and they wasted a lot of time doing that,” said Truscott. “I feel like Negan’s going to get his own. What goes around comes around. He’s going to get what’s coming to him. Hopefully.”

The Walking Dead airs each Sunday at 9:00 pm and is followed by The Talking Dead at 10:00 pm.