The ending of The Walking Dead series finale showed the survivors eating dinner after finding peace in the Commonwealth, and though Negan is excluded from this meal, his absence provides an important callback to a pivotal moment in The Walking Dead's past. Despite the finale of AMC's long-running series setting up the upcoming spinoffs, a satisfying ending was found in the main communities. The survivors ousted Pamela Milton and took over the Commonwealth, reshaping it and rebuilding Alexandria and the Hilltop Colony to allow for a brighter future. Negan's story will continue in The Walking Dead: Dead City, but his finale story has a deeper meaning than anybody first realized.
The Walking Dead viewers will remember the explosive premiere of season 7, "The Day Will Come When You Won't Be," which featured the deaths of Abraham and Glenn to Negan's bat, Lucille. After murdering his friends, Negan takes Rick away for a private chat, tormenting him with a speech about what Rick expected from their new lives in Alexandria, stating, "bet you thought you were all gonna grow old together, sittin' around the table at Sunday dinner and the happily ever after, no..." Along with several other callbacks to previous seasons in The Walking Dead series finale, the family dinner scene at the end was one of the most powerful, with Negan's absence nodding back to this prior interaction.
How Negan’s “Happily Ever After” Speech Was Referenced In TWD’s Series Finale
Negan's speech was one of the more subtle callbacks in The Walking Dead series finale, but was perhaps one of its most important. Negan's character arc since his debut in the season 6 finale, "Last Day on Earth," has been bigger than most, seeing him go from brutal dictator to reformed family man, and the mirroring of his "happily ever after" speech from season 7 only accentuates this idea. There was a time when Negan thought this big family dinner, eaten in peace and surrounded by love, was impossible, but the core group of survivors proved him wrong once again and got the perfect ending they deserved and fought for.
What It Means For Negan To Be Excluded From The Dinner Table
While the survivors celebrated their victory with dinner, Negan was excluded from the occasion, instead choosing to wander off to start his own new life. Negan's redemption has been a huge storyline in The Walking Dead, culminating in emotional exchanges with Maggie, showing him finally apologize for killing her husband, and though she couldn't forgive him, they mutually agreed to try and move on from the past. Perhaps, for Negan, this means cutting ties with the people he has terrorized for years just by existing, so while his exclusion from the dinner scene might have been self-inflicted, he chose to stay away in an effort to further protect the others.
While Negan and Maggie will once again come together during their upcoming spinoff, Dead City, it seems for the time being that Negan might be making his presence scarce around the group. The change seen in the character from when he gave his "happily ever after" speech in season 7 to The Walking Dead series finale is remarkable, and only made more powerful by the huge emotional impact of his actions, both on him as a person and on the group of survivors as a whole. The Walking Dead might be over, but Negan's story will continue to develop when his Dead City spinoff with Maggie releases sometime in 2023.