Here's the timeline of events in Negan's The Walking Dead backstory. To cross the coronavirus divide between The Walking Dead seasons 10 and 11, a mini run of six episodes chronicles the period from the Whisperer War to the beginning of the Commonwealth arc. The episodes have proved divisive, with some stripping The Walking Dead back to basics, and others getting mired in soup-making misery. Perhaps the most anticipated of the anthology episodes, however, was always Negan's backstory with Lucille and, sure enough, the heartbreaking Jeffrey Dean Morgan flashback is a harrowing journey back to the early days of the apocalypse.
In true The Walking Dead fashion, the exact timeline of Negan's history is deliberately vague. "Here's Negan" begins in the show's present, then gradually works back to his days before the Saviors. The episode then jumps even further into the past, reaching back to when the first few zombies were being reported. Thanks to Fear The Walking Dead, we know the outbreak began at some point in 2010, but Robert Kirkman has generally avoided specifics. With The Walking Dead's Negan backstory bouncing around like a zombie rolling down a hill, how does the actual chronology play out?
Pre-outbreak (2010) - A down-on-his-luck Negan has been fired from his job as a high school gym teacher after a bar fight with a parent who had it coming. Negan buys an expensive leather jacket on a credit card, causing tension with his wife Lucille, but that's only the tip of the iceberg - he's cheating with her best friend when she's first diagnosed with cancer. The health scare prompts Negan to change his ways.
Post-outbreak 2010 (seven months later) - Negan and Lucille are hanging on together in their house, using a generator to chill the remaining chemotherapy treatments. Despite their difficult circumstances and Negan's reluctance to kill the undead, the couple are happy, and Lucille gives Negan the infamous leather jacket from seven months prior as a gift. So reluctant is he to avoid dispatching zombies, Negan turns the noisy generator off too long, and Lucille's medicine is spoiled. Negan remembers hearing about a mobile clinic, and resolves to locate them.
2010 (six weeks later than that) - A dehydrated and disorientated Negan stumbles finally across the elusive clinic. Despite threatening the father and daughter duo at gunpoint, a groggy Negan is no match, and gets fatefully clocked over the head with a baseball bat. Fortunately, Laura (a future Savior) and Franklin take pity on the stranger, patch him up and willingly hand over all the treatments Lucille requires to complete her course of chemotherapy. Since Negan's gun wasn't loaded when he arrived, the pair also give him the baseball bat for protection, marking the start of a long and not-so-beautiful friendship.
2010 (2/3 days later than that) - Carrying the chemotherapy medicine in a cooler, Negan is kidnapped by Valak's Vipers, and tortured by Craven until he gives up the real location of the meds runners. As agreed, the thugs let Negan go with his wife's medication, but he returns to find her already zombified. Irate at his own failure and the delay caused by the Vipers, he dons the leather jacket, wraps his bat with barbed wire cut from the fence around his house, and returns to the hideout, beating each and everyone one of Craven's people to death. Franklin and Laura are saved, and presumably become the first of his Saviors.
Present day (2022) - With an aura of rage still sizzling from Maggie, Carol takes Negan to Leah's cabin as a form of exile. Negan correctly deduces that the decision is Carol's, rather than the Alexandrian council's. Remembering Michonne's claim that Lucille was abandoned on the battlefield, Negan returns to the site of his final fight with Rick from The Walking Dead season 8. He digs up the bat, but years of rot means Lucille isn't what she used to be, and she breaks immediately. After confronting his inner demons, Negan elects to return to the main settlement. Carol is satisfied that if Maggie kills him, it won't be on her conscience, and Lauren Cohan looks on, disgruntled.