7 ways to fix The Walking Dead

The Walking Dead has seen better days. Still, with last spring's brutal cliffhanger — seen through the eyes of the Alexandrian that the nefarious Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) bludgeons to death — AMC's The Walking Dead has set up its most highly anticipated season to date. Andrew Lincoln, who plays protagonist Rick Grimes, promised in a recent interview that the new episodes — which kick off this Sunday — are "deeper" and "darker" than ever, as the series introduces multiple societies from Robert Kirkman's and Charlie Adlard's comic books: The Sanctuary, home to Negan's Saviors, and the Kingdom, where Ezekiel (Khary Payton) and his tiger, Shiva, lead a more idyllic community of survivors.

There's a lot of promise to season 7. But there's also a lot to be worried about, given the show's stumbles over the last several seasons. So here, seven wishes for The Walking Dead season 7. (Be warned, some spoilers from the comics lie within.) Of course, the episodes are all done — there's no changing them now! But a fan can hope, can't he?

1. Don't kill Glenn!

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As readers of the comics know, Negan's first victim from the Alexandria Safe-Zone is stalwart Grimes ally Glenn Rhee (Steven Yeun) — a kindly, feisty, often funny member of the group whose loss would leave the ensemble weaker in the long run. Still, for last season's grim finale to pay off, The Walking Dead will have to kill off a character of some import. If it's not Glenn, the second-best guess might be Abraham (Michael Cudlitz), who in the comics receives the arrow through the eye that kills Denise (Merritt Wever) in the sixth season's "Twice as Far."

2. Relax, Negan.

Morgan's delivery of Negan's "pee-pee pants city" monologue, just before unleashing his wrath, was the nadir of The Walking Dead's uneven sixth season. (At the time I called it "risible," "a leather-clad lesson in overplaying your hand.") It's one thing for the leader of the Saviors, having built a slavish cult of personality, to evince excessive lust for power; it's quite another, knowing that he'll play a major role in the upcoming season, for Negan to be a one-note baddie worthy of a Saturday morning cartoon. Morgan and the writers will have to find more layers in the character's villainy to make him watchable on a weekly basis. His maniacal laughter in the trailer unveiled at Comic-Con doesn't offer much hope on this front, unfortunately.

3. Show Rick humbled.

It was our hero's arrogance, in the aftermath of the confrontation at the Hilltop, that led the Alexandrians into the mess they're in, overestimating his own posse's capabilities and underestimating the manpower at Negan's disposal. AMC's sneak peek at the seventh season hints at one of the comics' defining moments, in which The Governor severs Rick's hand, but even if Negan chooses not to bring down the ax, it's high time Rick grappled with the consequences of his own comfort with violence. There's a war coming, or so it seems. In the meantime, though, the Alexandrians' abrupt change of circumstances offers an opportunity to recapture the more reflective Rick of earlier seasons, and to remind us that he's not "the good guy" in this equation simply because he's the series' protagonist.

4. Stay focused.

The most effective episodes in the latter half of the sixth season confined the drama to claustrophobic spaces and dug deep into one or two characters — "Twice as Far," which turned its attention to Denise, and "The Same Boat," which featured Melissa McBride's extraordinary performance as Carol Peletier. It's a lesson The Walking Dead would do well to remember as the seventh season likely brings the Alexandria Safe-Zone, the Hilltop, the Sanctuary, and the Kingdom into closer contact. The series remains strongest when it frames the clash of post-apocalyptic civilizations through the lens of the individual, rather than zooming out to the bird's-eye view.

5. Pay heed to Carl.

Assuming he survives the encounter with Negan, Carl's (Chandler Riggs) participation in the attempt to ambush the Saviors opens the door to a fascinating twist on the zombie genre: the coming-of-age story. In the thick of adolescence, Rick's son has proven he's made of the same tough stuff as his father — he valiantly dealt with the loss of his eye in "No Way Out" — but growing up in the ruins is sure to affect him in ways we can't quite predict. Will he follow in Rick's footsteps, and become a sometimes-ruthless leader? Or start to resist the moral compromises his father makes in the name of survival? As he joins the fight, the seventh season is likely to begin answering these questions, and one hopes The Walking Dead will give the young man's complexities increasing attention.

6. Spend more time with Carol.

Since "The Same Boat," Carol has wrestled with the implications of those very compromises, to the point that she fled Alexandria altogether. After her subsequent brushes with danger in "East" and "Last Day on Earth," the latter of which introduces members of the Kingdom for the first time, Carol seems likely to go through another spate of self-examination. The series could derive a lot of in-depth character work from this process. At root, Carol's despair stems from her sense that goodness, as she understands it, has been leached from the world. Proof that there are pockets of it left, including inside her own soul, might well change the equation.

7. Make good on the first season's promise.

The title of the season 7 premiere, "The Day Will Come When You Won't Be," is an allusion to the first season's finale, "TS-19." Set at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, the season 1 finale culminates with Rick's group's narrow escape from the incineration of the facility where Dr. Edwin Jenner (Noah Emmerich) tried, and failed, to find a cure for the plague that's wiped out most of mankind. "I'm grateful," Rick says of Jenner's decision to let them live. "The day will come when you won't be," Jenner replies, darkly. Perhaps the horror predicted near the end of the first season is Negan himself, but the more compelling possibility is a return to the words Jenner once whispered to Rick, particularly with war on the horizon: "We're all infected."