Well, that was needlessly sadistic.Listen, I understand that it's The Walking Dead . I know what comes with this show. I've read the comics too, which often have to get toned down when carried over to the screen (though not this time around, that's for sure). I get it. But this was a numbing trudge. An hour of Negan-splaining and cruelty.

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Granted, I was against the Season 6 finale cliffhanger to begin with, so I had that sitting on my shoulder coming in. Last season, the show became a giant tease machine that seemed more interested in goosing the viewer, toying with fans' emotions, than it did with delivering on story. But there was still a chance to rebound with this premiere, if it was handled right.Not handling it right would be giving us, oh, an entire episode of bullying and masochism. Don't get me wrong, Jeffrey Dean Morgan's smiling, bellowing agent of evil, Negan, has some interesting elements to him. I like the juxtaposition too of his mood versus his horrible actions. But "The Day Will Come When You Won't Be" was just unpleasant to watch. It was if the Red Wedding lasted an entire hour just so that it could pad out an episode and fit in a crapload of commercials.Not handling this premiere right would also mean waiting 15 to 20 minutes before revealing who died. Yup, that's what happened. Rick had to not only imagine everyone's faces (as if Aaron and Rosita somehow meant the same to him as Daryl and Michonne - bah), but then he had to take a quick RV trip with Negan just so we could listen to Negan put Rick in his place some more. All the while, by the way, teasing Rick losing his "right hand" to his own axe. Yes, that old comic book chestnut coming back years after the show didn't have The Governor do it. So despite Negan's bouncy bravado, this felt plodding, in-between the blood.Oh yeah, and we got Rick imagining the rest of the people in line, those who survived, getting hit with Lucille too. It was a unnerving and confusing for a second since it seemed, briefly, like everyone died. But then you just realized that the episode was using all the footage they shot (which was every character getting hit so as to hide the real victims ) in a weird way.Let's get into the victims now. The first, BECAUSE THERE WERE TWO (see: the show being more interested in swerves than payoffs), was Abraham. Actually, he was my guess (and IGN's Eric Goldman's as well, among others). Abraham was the safe middle-grounder who wasn't one of the show's untouchables but also not someone who didn't mean enough. But just to get to him we had to watch Negan go through the "eeny, meeny, miny, moe" ritual again because the show's only setting this week was slow burn torture.The swerve here, the big kill, was Glenn. Which, of course, kind of s***s all over Abraham's death, right? (trying not to make a Red-Hair-ing pun so hard!) Also, many of us who read the comics thought that Glenn (who - SPOILER! - was the one killed by Negan in the comics) would live through this because of all the malarky we had to go through last season with the big dumpster fake-out death that hardly anyone was fooled by. Now all of that was for nothing. Again, the show is less interested now in making sense than it is with shock and/or awe. It wants to purposefully deceive us, even if it's by just letting us assume only one person dies. ( Here's a breakdown of how the big kills compare to Glenn's death in the comics. Glenn dying was sad, for sure, and doing it in the same gross way as the comics too, with his eye popping out, was very uncomfortable to watch. But we've had all summer to imagine every possible person dying - knowing too that nothing would happen to Rick or Daryl or Michonne. When Negan killed Glenn in the comic series, it came out of nowhere. No one knew ahead of time that a big character was about to bite it. That would have worked better here for sure. Instead though, because it was a drawn out cliffhanger, they had to one-two punch us to try and get ahead of our expectations. Doing that just felt phony.By the time the episode reached the part where Negan was going to make Rick chop off Carl's arm, I kind of didn't care anymore. By that point we'd been watching Rick cry and shake for forty five minutes and the agony was spread thin. Sure, a part of me was giddy that Rick was getting a bit of a comeuppance given his murderous first-strike tactics from last year, but this was too much. It crossed a line, but not one of gore. Or death, even. Not necessarily. It basically broke the final shred of trust in the show to service characters over gimmickry.