The Walking Dead Mid-Season 7 Premiere: 10 Big Questions After 'Rock In The Road'
As The Walking Dead returns one character goes missing, but a whole other community emerges.
Welcome back The Walking Dead, you've been... not entirely missed.
The show entered its hiatus in trouble, or at least as troubled as a TV show still bringing in over 10 million viewers can be. Ratings are way down, slipping from 17 million from the Season 7 premiere to around 10.5m for the final few episodes of 7A, the lowest they've been since Season 3.
Going hand-in-hand with that has been poor critical reception, a lot of fan outrage, and some terrible storytelling choices.
It's not all bad though. As mentioned, the ratings are still pretty high despite the huge slump, and the mid-season finale offered hope of course-correction. The mid-season premiere, Rock in the Road, doesn't fully deliver, but it does continue to improve and lay the groundwork for better things to come.
The Walking Dead has exhibited so many issues on a macro level that it's difficult to trust in them truly fixing things going forward, but on an episodic level it at least gets the second half off to a solid, promising start.
Rock in the Road stars to build towards a war with Negan, bringing together communities, coalescing narratives, and leaving a lot of questions to be answered moving forwards.
10. What's Negan's Next Move?
Jeffrey Dean Morgan's Negan didn't appear in this episode, and that was no bad thing. The villain completely dominated the first half of Season 7, but without being a truly captivating antagonist, with little nuance despite Morgan's clear enjoyment in playing the character.
However, we do hear him over the radio in this instalment, and he remains the Big Bad of the show; both of the remainder of Season 7, and the one it's almost certainly going to rely on for at least part of Season 8.
That means he is rather important to the plot, so what does he do next? As far as he knows, he holds all the cards - except Daryl, anyway. Will he be content with things ticking over as they are, or is going to make a move to keep everyone on their toes? The Saviours have been created as an almost omnipotent threat thus far, so can a rebellion really be built without them and Negan noticing?