After next week, I’m likely done with Walking Dead. It’s turned into being silly and not thinking forward. Killing off Carl, then killing off Rick, kills off every future story arc from the comics. Sure, they can take Rick’s part in the comics, where Negan taunts him from the cell, and give that part to Michonne (which it seems like that’s exactly what they are doing). But it doesn’t work, and it will not work, because for the past almost 2 years of shows, Rick and Negan have an antagonistic relationship. Michonne does not. From the moment they met, Negan tried to mentally break Rick on top of the RV. Negan tried to break Rick at Alexandria. Negan tried to get to Rick through Carl. Negan’s interactions with Michonne were never on a psychological and personal level, as they were with Rick. AMC can attempt to do that, and it seems that they are with Negan bringing up Michonne’s son Andre. But that’s only exposition, and we never actually see or have met Andre. Exposition is much, much weaker than actual interaction.

To compare it with other stories, you can’t take the Darth Vader vs. Luke Skywalker antagonistic relationship, then kill off Luke in the middle of the story, and then replace that adversarial foundation that the reader has with a confrontation between Darth vs. Han Solo. It just doesn’t work. In a literary comparison, you can’t take the Agamemnon vs Achilles, prematurely kill off Achilles, and replace all his story lines with Agamemnon vs Ajax. Sure you COULD swap characters, but because they have no prior history of antagonism built up, the story lines, the tension and drama do not not work the same way, because they have very different motivations, strengths and weaknesses when played off of each other, change everything about the story going forward.