Our favorite former sheriff is no longer a brave leader—he’s a huge liability.
Oh, how the mighty have fallen. So far, The Walking Dead’s seventh season has been all about taking our favorite heroes and knocking them down a peg or five—and its fourth installment, “Service,” spends 85 minutes knocking them down even further. There’s no doubt that Negan is this group’s most formidable foe yet—but is poor leadership making a big problem even worse? More discussion ahead, but first, your usual spoiler warning.
Hoo, boy! To put it bluntly, Rick really screwed the pooch on this one. When Negan came a-knocking at Alexandria’s gates earlier than expected, our favorite former sheriff tried to play it cool, but made some really crappy decisions. While Gabriel displayed quick thinking, digging a fake grave to make Negan think Maggie died (more on that later), Rick went ahead and showed Negan every one of the group’s cards—before going ahead and handing them all over. No quick thinking, no strategy, no nothing; just deferential decisions made out of sheer fear.
What, exactly, did Rick do wrong? Let’s start with the fact that when he and Carl were standing in a room with an unarmed Negan and only two other men, Rick didn’t let Carl simply shoot Negan in the face. What, shooting Negan sounds like an awful plan? Think of it this way: Negan’s a dictator. His men have only one level of organization; all their orders seem to come from the top, a.k.a. the leather-clad despot himself. Cut off the head of an organization like that, and all of the body parts will be unable to do much more than flail around like, well, you know.
By showing up in Alexandria for a tour, Negan planted himself away from home base with a limited number of men to back him up. As every sports fan knows, away games are always harder to win than home games—and after they arrived, Negan’s men dispersed across Alexandria, a place they’ve never entered before. If Rick had thought this through as they braced for Negan’s arrival, he’d have ordered everyone capable of taking Negan out to do so if they had the chance—Carl included. It’s hard to say whether Negan’s men would even really bother avenging him—after all, they all joined his ranks under duress, and some pretty brutal circumstances. But even if they did, they would likely be poorly organized and relatively easy to defeat—even despite their superior numbers.
So, why didn’t Rick signal Carl to turn the gun on Negan—with Negan unarmed and one of his henchmen merely holding a crate, while Rick had a bat and Carl had a gun? Well, the obvious reason is that he‘s this season‘s big bad guy, and after more than a year of build-up, The Walking Dead certainly can’t kill him off after just a few episodes. (Especially given the fact he’s being played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan.) But what’s the in-show explanation for Rick turning down all those shots to take Negan down? It’s a pretty convincing one: Looks like he was simply too terrified of Negan to think tactically and take them. Case in point: that moment when Negan was dispatching a walker with a candlestick, and Rick stood glowering behind him, white-knuckling Lucille.
Look, I get it. Negan’s the first big-bad to really get under Rick’s skin—first by killing off two of his closest friends, then by stopping just shy of making him cut off his own son’s hand. That would rattle just about anyone. But it’s also worth remembering that Rick’s actually been a pretty crappy leader for a long time. Looking back at his legacy of authoritarianism and poor decision-making, it’s hard to blame Spencer when he snaps at Rick and calls him out for the consequences of his decisions. Now that Negan’s shown his full strength, Rick has crumbled into a poor excuse for a leader. Luckily, The Walking Dead has been quietly developing several potential successors for a long time. And one of them, Michonne, seems increasingly primed to step up to the plate.
It’s not insignificant that when they arrived in Alexandria, Michonne and Rick were both appointed constables. And when Rick went bananas in the streets, ranting and raving? Michonne was the one who knocked him out. As she spoke with Deanna about her vision for what Alexandria could be, and about finding what survival meant to her, Michonne’s hinted potential only gleamed brighter. Now, with Rick completely broken, it could be her time to take the reigns. From what we see in this episode, she’s far from ready to bow down to Negan just yet.
Michonne spends most of the episode out in an open field, practicing her marksmanship with a rifle. (Her weapon of choice, a katana, is far less useful for long-range combat than a gun.) But when she returns to Alexandria, Rick demands she hand over the gun so he can give it to Negan. The gun wasn’t in the town’s inventory, so Negan would never have known they had it. But Rick decided to barter it away for trust—and, hopefully, enough brownie points to convince Negan to leave Daryl with them. Never mind that Negan already seized every last gun they had—or that, so far, he hasn’t exactly proven capable of being talked into anything he doesn’t feel like doing. Naturally, this did not pan out; Negan took the rifle, and Rick was left empty-handed.
Luckily, another of the show’s badass women—Rosita—is just as unafraid as Michonne, and has already started frisking walkers for guns they can hoard in secret. Honestly, were it not for the women on this show, there would be little to no good judgment left—which brings us to one final note about this episode: the glaring absence of Sasha and Maggie. For three episodes in a row now, the show has kept the lens off the two characters viewers might want to hear from most. They did both just lose their beloveds, after all. It seems that from its cliff-hanger beginning to the very end, this season will be all about the suspense. Let’s just hope it isn’t too long before we venture over to Hilltop to see how these two are doing. Maggie was in pretty dire but determined shape when we last saw her, after all. If we had to guess, she and Sasha have already got just as many tricks up their sleeve as Michonne, Rosita, and Carol do—if not a few more.
