WARNING: The following article contains major spoilers for the Season 9 premiere of The Walking Dead.


Tonight’s premiere of The Walking Dead served spots of reflection, revelation and good old fashioned terror as only this show can. But perhaps its most shocking moments came at the very end as Maggie finally did what we’ve wanted her to do for three seasons already and put Gregory out of business once and for all.

The corrupt AF former Hilltop leader got himself hung after orchestrating an attempt on Maggie’s life. If that weren’t bad enough, he did so by manipulating a dead kid’s parents and plying his alcoholic father with booze. When that didn’t work, he finally tried to do the deed himself, only to be thwarted one final time by Maggie Rhee.

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At the end of the episode, it appeared as though she would mete out punishment on Earl (John Finn) who actually perpetrated the initial attack, but in a surprise twist, she revealed it was Gregory who would pay with his life. After a predictable period of weeping and begging to no avail, she hung him, and one of TWD’s most oddly enduring characters finally took his leave.

The episode was clearly structured in such a way to make it seem as though Gregory’s death was a TWIST!, but that’s not quite how it landed… It was a twist, to be sure, but not because Maggie made it seem like she was going to execute Earl. It was a twist because given the amount of times Gregory managed to sneak away from certain death, we’d given up hope he’d ever get what was coming to him.

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When he arrived in Season 6, Gregory was a man who’d survived an impressively long time by being selfish. He’d hung on to his position at the Hilltop not because he felt a responsibility to his constituents, but because he wanted to stay alive with a measure of comfort and he knew the only way to do that was by staying in power. That’s what made him a functional leader, but ultimately left a window open for a truly great leader like Maggie.

Once it became clear she was supplanting him, Gregory tried to sell out the Hilltop to the Saviors only to have them completely reject his leadership in front of Simon, Negan and the rest of the Savior leadership. Somehow he managed to survive that betrayal and even make it back into enough of Maggie’s good graces for her to allow him out of prison and to concede when he insisted they have an election.

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It came as no surprise that he’d be a sore loser, trying any which way he could to oust Maggie, in an attempt to restore both his own position and his wounded pride. What did come as a surprise was that on a show that killed a little girl because she was a liability to the future of humanity, someone like Gregory managed to survive as long as he did – or at least retain a position that allowed him to exert the influence he did tonight.

Gregory Simon The Walking Dead

On the one hand, Gregory serves as a great example of someone who survives by taking advantage of the trust and kindness of those burdened by scruples. He’s a coward at heart, so he’s a more insidious villain than Negan, who, at the very least, had a code and a mission that wasn’t inherently selfish (or wasn’t inherently selfish all the time). And while he did maintain the safety of the residents in his community, it was clear he would’ve sold out the entire population if it meant bettering his own position.

Essentially, Gregory served as a great reminder of the fact that the apocalypse doesn’t distinguish between those who care about humanity as a whole and those who don’t. That, in turn, lent a necessary sense of realism to the story once it got to the community-building stage. Once things move beyond life and death, they don’t get easier, they just get more complicated as people figure out different ways to ensure they get what they want.

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But at the end of the day, it never felt right from a narrative standpoint that Gregory would’ve survive a confrontation like All Out War, especially after betraying his own community. Granted, it was a very Gregory thing to do to manage to survive long enough to take advantage of what appeared to be Rick’s blanket amnesty and manage to crawl his way back into a position of influence. But we’d seen him do that time and time again, and it wasn’t nearly as entertaining or as revelatory as when someone like Eugene did it.

As satisfying as it was to see him finally hang for his many crimes, and as technically well the scene worked, there’s still a big part of us that wished Simon had popped him the minute their plan failed. As it stands, the fact that he hung around long enough to be so utterly predictable kind of cut the legs out from under what could have been a genuine twist as season or so back.