In The Walking Dead season 11, Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) has offered a deeply flawed defense for the crimes the Saviors committed; here’s why he’s totally wrong. Though Negan is supposedly a changed man, he’s continuing to hold onto some of his old ideas about the Saviors and what they represented. He never saw his people as the villains and apparently, still doesn’t.
Negan made another case for the Saviors not being as bad as people think in The Walking Dead season 11, episode 7, titled “Promises Broken”. In a conversation with Maggie (Lauren Cohan), Negan reminded her that killing Glenn (Steven Yuen) and Abraham (Michael Cudlitz) was in retaliation for an attack that their group launched on one of his bases in season 6. He tried to humanize the Saviors by pointing out that many of his men lost loved ones that day. The idea behind all this is that the Saviors aren’t the monsters Maggie and so many perceived them to be. Negan clearly doesn’t see them as being that different to Alexandria and in his eyes, they did what they had to do to survive.
Negan’s argument ignores a few facts about the Saviors and how the All-Out War started. First of all, the people of Alexandria had good reasons for attacking the satellite station. They got a taste of how violent they were when a group of them tried to capture Daryl (Norman Reedus), Abraham, and Sasha (Sonequa Martin-Green), without provocation. It was made clear then that Negan’s men were villains and this was further illustrated in a meeting with the Hilltop, who explained more about how they work.
Rick’s group learned from the Hilltop that the Saviors practically enslaved entire communities. They had what could be described as a mafia mentality, in that they forced settlements to provide food and labor in exchange for protection. Rick experienced this first-hand in season 7 when the Saviors threatened them into servitude. During this time, the depth of their cruelty was on full display, with Negan almost forcing Rick to cut off Carl’s hand and the Saviors constantly bullying people at places like the Kingdom. The three communities ended up rebelling because they were essentially pushed into fighting back. The Saviors kept needling and aggravating them until they all reached breaking point and reached a stage where war felt inevitable.
The way the Saviors ran things made the people of Alexandria, the Hilltop, and the Kingdom unbearably miserable. It’s for these reasons Negan’s defense of the Saviors in The Walking Dead season 11 ultimately fails. They may have suffered losses and heartaches of their own, but that doesn’t make them sympathetic figures. It’s apparently Negan’s opinion that the conflict between Alexandria and the Saviors wasn’t all black-and-white, but when looking at all the bloodshed they caused, there’s no question who the bad guys were during the All-Out War.
