There are SPOILERS ahead if you don't know who was killed on this past Sunday's season 7 premiere of AMC's The Walking Dead – and if you've managed to avoid that information to this point, despite all the media coverage, fan mourning, and the outcry over the brutality of the violence, your spoiler avoidance skills are highly impressive. (Read our take on the episode HERE.)
On Sunday, 17 million viewers tuned in to The Walking Dead to find out the answer to the season six cliffhanger question, "Who did Negan kill?" Many were left wishing that they hadn't been given the answer, as it turned out to be two people, the nastiest death being reserved for a long-time fan favorite who has been with the show since the beginning. However, we're going to focus on the first death of the episode, where the person who was getting pounded in the head with Negan's barbed wire-wrapped baseball bat Lucille in the final seconds of the season six finale turned out to be Abraham.
That's the death that made it to the air. But to help keep the secret, baseball bat death scenes were filmed for all eleven of Negan's potential victims. Images of everyone taking a baseball bat to the head were included in the season seven premiere as the possibility of their deaths passed through the mind of the show's main character Rick, but in at least some cases they went even further than those quick and simple shots.
As evidence of this, we have a video of an alternate take of the first death scene, a video that was likely leaked purposely by AMC in an effort to throw people off the Abraham trail before the season premiere.
In this video, Maggie is the person chosen to be killed by Negan. We see reactions to this choice, we see Maggie taking Lucille to the head, showing defiance between hits. It's an actual Maggie death scene. Shot, cut together, and sent out into the world.
I'm hoping nothing like this is going to happen to Maggie anytime soon, but it is interesting to see this "what if?" version of Negan's first kill.