Walking Dead: Rick's Very First Zombie Kill Explains Negan's Final Fate

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By its ending, it becomes clear that The Walking Dead is the story of Rick Grimes and the way a small-town cop managed to reshape society in the wake of a zombie apocalypse. However, despite stretching over years of trials and tribulations — and even hinting that Rick would become the exact kind of monster his group fought against — it's the series' very first zombie kill that predicts who Rick will actually become, how he'll reshape society, and the final fate of the series' most charismatic antagonist, Negan.

Stretching over 193 chapters, The Walking Dead begins with Rick awakening to a world in the early days of a zombie outbreak, and ends many years in the future with a society that hails him as a hero. To get to that point, Rick had to fight off plenty of horrors — both undead and living — with few striking a more personal chord than Negan. Negan is the despotic ruler of a band of brutal survivors who hold other communities to ransom and kill several of Rick's friends. However, once he's defeated, Rick condemns Negan to imprisonment rather than execution, eventually converting the villain to a believer in his vision for society and instigating a lifelong process of grieving and atonement that's still underway when the series ends. It's this clarity of vision that allows Rick to change the fascistic Commonwealth, effectively saving human society from returning to its worst impulses.

Related: The Walking Dead Ends With Carl's Corruption

Strangely, Rick sparing Negan and redeeming the Commonwealth is actually foreshadowed by his very first zombie kill. In The Walking Dead #1  — from Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore — Rick awakes from a coma and escapes a zombie-filled hospital. Stumbling out onto the road, Rick discovers