When used correctly, a cliffhanger has the power to keep an audience on the edge of their seats, kick off an avalanche of speculation, and even encourage others to hop on board the bandwagon. But, when they’re not perfectly executed, a cliffhanger can divide a fandom – something that the creators of The Walking Dead learned following the premiere episode of the show’s seventh season. Season 6 left off on perhaps the biggest cliffhanger of the series, with the newly-introduced Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) holding Rick (Andrew Lincoln) and his group captive, on their knees, and in a circle, while tormenting them with his barbedwire-covered bat, lovingly dubbed Lucille. In the final moments of the show’s sixth season, Negan delivers a monologue, explaining that he’s going to murder members of the crew as retribution for the lives that were taken from his gang known as the Saviors. As he ends a quick and taunting game of eeny, meeny, miny, moe, Negan gets to swinging, only for the camera to cut out and the credits to roll.

Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) taunts Rick's group of survivors with his barbed-wired baseball bat, Lucille.

It wouldn’t be until the very beginning of the next season that fans learned who the very unlucky recipients were in a shocking reveal that sees Negan going to town first on Abraham (Michael Cudlitz) before turning his wrath onto Glenn (Steven Yeun). Not only were audiences taken aback that the series would kill off two of its primary characters (especially the beloved Glenn), but many were also thoroughly disgusted at the amount of gore left in the final cut. Both decisions would ultimately play into a strong downslope of viewership for the series, something that Lincoln now completely understands.

During an interview with Empire, Lincoln admits that he often thinks that the death of Glenn “might have been when we over-egged the omelette,” adding that keeping the camera on the man’s splattered head and his loose eye hanging from its socket was perhaps “lingering too much.” Now, nearly a decade later, Lincoln looks back on filming that hotly debated scenes as one of “the most intense nights of shooting I’ve ever been part of.”

Don’t Worry – Jeffrey Dean Morgan Is Still A Good Guy

the-walking-dead-jeffrey-dean-morgan-negan-social-featured Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) exits his camper van with a wry grin and his baseball bat Lucille over his shoulder.
Steven Yeun as Glenn and Michael Traynor as Nicholas standing on bin in The Walking Dead.

The brutal moment not only went down as one of the most graphic scenes in the history of The Walking Dead, but it also gave audiences a villain who would eventually turn into a fan-favorite and land a spin-off series (with the on-screen wife of the character he killed no less). Morgan’s performance as Negan was as soulless and hate-fueled as Jack Gleeson’s portrayal of Joffrey Baratheon in Game of Thrones, but Lincoln made it a point to note how kind and wonderful the Supernatural star is in real life, calling his co-star, “One of the nicest guys you’re ever going to meet, playing one of the most unpleasant characters.”

Reflecting on that harrowing night of filming and the impeccable way that Morgan rose to the task at hand, Lincoln continued,

“He had to do this extraordinary monologue on his first day at work, and everybody was on their knees and weeping when they weren’t on camera . [Morgan] came over and went, ‘Is this normal?’ I went, ‘Yeah, everybody just keeps going.’ It was an extraordinary night.”

All 11 seasons of The Walking Dead are now streaming on Netflix.