The Walking Dead found a subtle, yet heartwarming, way to honor Glenn Rhee in season 11's latest episode. Played so memorably by Steven Yeun, The Walking Dead's Glenn made an immediate impression upon audiences. A born survivor - but not in the same gritty mold as Rick Grimes or Daryl Dixon - Glenn remained a ray of hope and kindness in the zombie apocalypse, keeping the morale of his fellow survivors high with an endearing and infectious positivity. And then Negan mashed his brains with a baseball bat.
As in the comic books, this brutal murder was used to punctuate the arrival of the villainous Saviors, but Glenn's presence has hung heavy over The Walking Dead ever since. With all due respect to Abraham Ford (who also felt the wrong end of Negan's bat that day), Glenn has been the albatross around Alexandria's neck - an unforgivable sin that means Negan can never truly find acceptance, and Maggie can never truly find peace. And it's the return of Lauren Cohan's Maggie in The Walking Dead season 11 that brings Glenn into focus once again, with Negan recently invoking his name to controversially push Maggie's buttons. Fortunately, The Walking Dead isn't just using Glenn's memory for shock value.
When Maggie returned for the final battle of The Walking Dead season 10, she also brought a 9-year-old Hershel - Glenn's son, conceived shortly before he died. Since Hershel was merely an infant pre-time skip, season 11 marks the first real opportunity for The Walking Dead to give him actual personality and character. And, in a heartfelt tribute to Glenn, little Hershel appears to have inherited all of his father's hallmark traits, as well as adopting the same social role Steven Yeun's character took in The Walking Dead's early seasons.
In "Hunted," young Hershel is seen helping Judith, RJ and the other kids overcome the tricky hurdle of eating horse meat. This is exactly the kind of thing Glenn would do back in the day. Though he wasn't a natural fighter or a born leader, Glenn had a knack for survival - a resourcefulness that led to him becoming a supply runner for Rick's group. Unlike some, Glenn would always use these skills to aid others, exemplified by helping Rick Grimes escape a horde of zombies (from inside a tank, no less) during his very first appearance. There's also an unavoidable (albeit not especially wholesome) symmetry in how Hershel helps Rick's children eat horse, when Glenn once helped Rick slip away from a crowd of undead by... letting them eat his horse.
As well as inheriting his father's kindness, compassion and survival instincts, Hershel also displays a very Glenn-like sense of sarcastic humor. Describing his time in the wild with Maggie, the youngster teases Judith and the other kids by saying horse meat "isn't that bad... not like the spiders." It's similar to Glenn asking whether Rick is "cosy" in his tank or warning how "it'll be the fall that kills us" before they scale a building. Glenn and Hershel share the exact same habit of laughing in the face of adversity to make those around them more comfortable.
With Negan serving as a constant reminder of Glenn's messy final moments and Maggie still harboring a hunger for vengeance, Glenn's legacy in The Walking Dead is so often filled with doom, gloom and violence. But by giving Hershel all of the qualities that made viewers fall in love with Glenn a decade ago - a willingness to help others, survival instincts, sarcasm, etc. - The Walking Dead season 11 finds a much more poignant way to honor Glenn Rhee before the zombie apocalypse series comes to an end. In a future spinoff, it'll be interesting to see whether an adult Hershel becomes even more reminiscent of his late father.