‘The Walking Dead’ needs to stop distracting the audience from its biggest moments

The second episode of “The Walking Dead’s” seventh season did a lot of world building, introducing viewers to the Kingdom and its king Ezekiel (Khary Payton), both of which will become major players as the story continues.

There was something vital missing from the episode though, and that’s any mention whatsoever of what happened in the Season 7 premiere. While there’s plenty of non-Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) story to tell, completely avoiding it rather than giving any followup whatsoever really diminishes the impact of the deaths of Abraham (Miichael Cudlitz) and Glenn (Steven Yeun).

Negan and Lucille killing the two fan favorite characters was not just a major moment in the season, but in the series as a whole. Fans deserve the time to grieve with their character and are being deprived of it.

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Of course, this sort of move is nothing new for “The Walking Dead.” It was only last season that the viewers were left thinking Glenn had died when Nicholas (Michael Traynor) killed himself and knocked him into a hoard of zombies. That ended an episode and one week later a flashback that centered around Morgan (Lennie James) aired.

That episode, “Here’s Not Here,” was one of Season 6’s best in terms of quality but left a bad taste in the mouths of many as it completely ignored the cliffhanger. What’s more, it took two additional episodes before the show addressed Glenn’s fate.

By that point, fans had grown restless while waiting to find out what happened and the reveal that Glenn was alive didn’t carry much weight. It also left fans bitter about the season as a whole by the time the Negan cliffhanger came in the finale.

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Now the show is already doing same thing again, except this time fans know two characters they love have been murdered. They simply don’t know what that means for the group of survivors now. As with last season, that’s not going to sit well with many. Maggie (Lauren Cohan) is ready to declare war on Negan for killing her husband and Rick (Andrew Lincoln) has been mentally broken. Leaving those story threads hanging for who knows how many episodes is not going to go over well.

The truly unfortunate thing is that this episode, “The Well,” is a great one. As with “Here’s Not Here,” it weaves a great story with interesting characters — new and old. In this instance though, Ezekiel and his followers are going to matter throughout this season and possibly beyond. Their first impression needed to be strong and it was.

If only that first impression had come at a better time for the story.

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