After the season six finale ended on a cliffhanger right before revealing which of the show’s 11 characters met their gruesome end at the hands of Negan (Jeffery Dean Morgan), there was some worry that the show had reached its low point. Fortunately, the premiere for season seven manages to regain the footing of the series and make up for missteps of the previous season.

The first 20 minutes of the episode, entitled “The Day Will Come When You Won’t Be,” are a bit worrisome. After over six months of fans waiting for the pointless reveal that should have happened in the season six finale, the show runners decided that everyone should wait for 20 extra minutes to find out who the victim was. While they did that, they let Rick (Andrew Lincoln) have a flashback about all of the survivors who were lined up with him to annoyingly taunt the audience even more with, “Who was it? You still don’t know. You have to wait just a little longer.”

While there was still that pointless aspect to this episode, which plagued a lot of episodes last season and especially in the season six finale, this premiere seems to reaffirm that the show runners know what the problems of last season were and are going to work on them.

This episode confirms that this is indeed a bad time for the characters to be living in, and any one of them can die at any time. Past episodes featured the deaths of characters, but it felt a lot of the time like you could see the deaths coming, especially last season. While I said in the article I wrote about the season finale back in April that there were only three possible characters that could die to live up to the scene’s expectations (Daryl, Glenn or Abraham), there was still some amount of uncertainty over who it could be. The premiere continues to enforce this idea by having Negan kill off a second character in the line up, after his initial selection.

Another reaffirming quality of the episode is its building of the character of Negan. The previous season was filled with flat characters that lacked a lot of reasoning for why their characters were acting a certain way; even characters that had been established in the first couple of seasons were flat and seemed to lack any sort of emotional or character reasoning. Negan, on the other hand, gets built up as an aggressive dictator with a ruthless but logical sense of justice and a dark sense of humor. If more characters are built like him, then the characters will be able to carry the show through its missteps.

The episode mostly focuses on the dynamics between Rick and Negan, and how hopeless things have become for Rick’s group. Not only are two important members of the group dead, but Negan demonstrates that he can get the group, or at least Rick the leader, to do anything he wants, regardless of what it is.

“The Day Will Come When You Won’t Be” is a well orchestrated episode that is used to ease the worries of fans and to show understanding of the show’s previous faults that the show runners mean to work on and fix.

Final Grade: B+