“We’re the ones who live.”

It’s a credo, a hope and a promise, one Michonne brings out on occasion as a source of encouragement and strength. It’s the message she used to give Rick the last push he needed, in “The Walking Dead” midseason finale, to kick off the rebellion effort, then again in later episodes as that effort gathered strength.

She tried to say it several times in Sunday’s Season 7 finale, during and after the fight for her life, but never was able to finish the statement. But she didn’t need to.

Because Rick, Michonne and friends did live on Sunday, in surprising numbers, as the show seemed to atone for the cliffhangers and slogging misery surrounding the arrival of Negan with a well-paced thriller of an episode that, as the creators have promised, kicked off a new, more hopeful phase of the story.

The only significant loss was Sasha, which presumably surprised no one. (“The show has all but measured her for a coffin,” I wrote about Sasha a few days ago. Turns out they did that, too.) In fact, many of the episode’s twists and pivots were fairly predictable.

The mercenary trash people were even trashier than we’d been led to believe, turning on the Alexandrians after striking a better deal with the Saviors. Maggie arrived with the Hilltop contingent, guns a-blazin’. Morgan and Carol came with the Kingdom calvary to turn the tide at a crucial moment. The tiger went to town.

But it was all generally well conceived and executed, as Sasha’s sacrifice both ignited the action and gave the episode an emotional undertow. The finale also pointed toward a more balanced future for “The Walking Dead” as it put Negan in his place, in multiple ways (more on that in a minute).

Sasha won multiple Most Likely to Die awards in this week’s finale previews, and we didn’t have to wait long for confirmation. The episode opened on her clearly en route as part of a Savior convoy, listening to R&B empowerment themes and fading from consciousness as the suicide pill Eugene gave her last week took effect.

It was a motif the episode returned to throughout, as Sasha’s timeline fractured into slivers of action and memory, with its pieces interspersed with the preparations at Alexandria and the Sanctuary as each side prepared to meet.

It was a nice showcase for a character (and an actress, Sonequa Martin-Green) that the show hasn’t always known what to do with. You’ll recall that Sasha took a quick trip through Crazytown after Tyreese and Bob died, before pairing off with Abraham not long before he, too, met his end. Since then, she’d been mostly hanging around until the nutty assassination scheme landed her in Savior captivity.

Pollyanna McIntosh and Andrew Lincoln in “The Walking Dead.”Credit…Gene Page/AMC

But asked to carry more emotional weight in the scenes with Negan, Ms. Martin-Green sold Sasha’s sorrow and grit with aplomb. “Just one person has to die,” she bargained, leaving out that the person would be her.

On the bright side, she (and we) got to see Abraham again, in a way, as she relived the last meaningful conversation they had before his death. The scenes put some meat on the bones of their relationship, retroactively making her suicide attack on the Sanctuary, in his name, seem somewhat less implausible. (But only somewhat.)

Along the way, Abraham helpfully summed up the humanist ethos of the show.

“It’s always for someone else,” he said. “Both of us know if we’re gonna kick, there sure as hell better be a point to it, so maybe we feel there was a point to all of this.”

The point of Sasha’s zombified arrival in Alexandria was to give an edge to her compatriots, and it worked. Walker Sasha took down Negan and took out some others, kicking off a mostly exciting, mostly coherent firefight that, after some empty bat threats and a well-timed tiger attack, saw nearly everyone in the show get a piece of the action. Before long Negan was evacuating, single-finger salute flying.

His flight marked the end of his tyrant phase and the beginning of a war that, as suggested by the grand, wide shots of the gathering opponents, seems likely to last for awhile.

Sonequa Martin-Green in “The Walking Dead.”Credit…Gene Page/AMC

On one side are the Saviors, last seen assembled at their Death Star, brushing up on battle cries. On the other is the coalition of Alexandria, the Kingdom and the Hilltop, signaling their goodness by sharing food and fellowship.

It wasn’t a flawless episode. The combat scenes came unglued toward the end, making it unclear who was who and where they were going. Maggie’s closing monologue, which essentially summed up the entire story to this point, reflected the show’s weakness for bludgeoning sentimentality. (Abraham said essentially the same thing much more succinctly.)

And I’m never going to be able to take the tiger seriously, but that’s my cross to bear.

The battle nevertheless represented a welcome turning point, for viewers as well as Rick and the gang. It suggests that after dominating the story, to its detriment, for more than a year, Negan may be a more agreeably proportionate presence in the coming season.

The back half of Season 6 was overshadowed by his looming appearance, his arrival brought the misguided finale cliffhanger, and the gory Season 7 premiere kicked off a string of wearying episodes mired in setup and grief. The big questions the character introduced — When’s Negan coming? Who will die when he does? When will they fight back? When’s the war starting? — could make the rest of the show seem superfluous.

Negan was intended to oppress the story and dispirit viewers, but the writers and Jeffrey Dean Morgan made it more wearying than it needed to be, the flashes of real charm and menace dulled by repetitive action and all those exclamations and backbends. The upshot was that a show once defined by near-constant motion ground to a halt. It wasn’t until the second half of this season, as the gang began to rebound, that it regained some sense of momentum.

Josh McDermitt in “The Walking Dead.”Credit…Gene Page/AMC

Again, this was mostly by design, but it was too much. Negan as just one backbending aspect of a broader, more balanced conflict for the future of humanity — that feels about right.

• So was your read that Jadis wanted 12 people as part of her arrangement with Negan? She’s not much of a negotiator, though I guess you don’t need to be if you’re just going to renege on the deal later. It remains to be seen whether the junk people will be another nemesis, going forward, or disappear for a while like the Wolves. (Remember them?)

• Raise your hand if you ever thought Michonne fell from that tower. Didn’t think so. At least they didn’t draw out the revelation.

• One of the subtlest signs of how far our heroes have come was that quick shot of apparent accord between Morgan and Carol. It’s been a complex relationship, going back at least to their clash over the rabid Wolf in Season 6. If those two are now fully on the same page, things are looking up.

• Eugene seemingly solidified his allegiance to the Saviors, telling his former comrades that “compliance and fealty are your only escapes” before everything went off. That said, it was his poison pill that made the Alexandrian victory possible, which Negan may figure out before long.

• Dwight also seems to have had a genuine change of loyalty, despite the fact that he ended the episode back at the Sanctuary. (He left a message on a carved soldier suggesting that he “didn’t know” about the Saviors’ deal with the junkers.) So will he plot from behind enemy lines next season? That may depend on whether he figures out that Daryl still plans to kill him, however things shake out. (I don’t think Daryl really will kill him, but Tara might.)

• What did you think of the finale? How would you grade Season 7 over all? What are your hopes for next season? Which wild animal would you recruit for your postapocalyptic army? Please share your thoughts in the comments. And, as always, thanks very much for reading for the past 16 weeks.