Just finished
The episode was fine. Unless I'm misremembering it, that wasn't how the Here's Negan comic went at all. Not really sure how I feel about 10C all-in-all
Some of the details were the same -
Negan being a gym coach and cheating on Lucille but stopping after her diagnosis but other than that it was entirely different. The TV version was much more focused on Negan's relationship with Lucille and the comic was more focused on Negan becoming
Negan and how he came to form his cult of personality. I think the show version was more emotionally resonant, but I don't think it would have worked for comic Negan at all.
10.C overall was a big mixed bag for me.:
Home Sweet Home was solid and I thought they were setting up a rough overarching storyline that would play out across the 6 episodes with the Reapers, but that didn't happen (maybe for the best as the show doing another "group of crazy bad guys" storyline would feel played out at this point).
Find Me was decent, and maybe planted some seeds for the spin off, but I felt like it kind of ripped off John and June's episode from S4 of Fear (and to a lesser extent, reminded me of Dwight and Sherry's situation from a few seasons ago).
One More was pretty good and helped flesh Gabe and Aaron out a bit.
Splinter gave us some interesting tidbits about Princess and the Commonwealth, but also gave off strong "this was filmed during quarantine and we don't want to advance this storyline in any meaningful way until S11" vibes.
Diverged - as much as I like the idea of following the characters through an average day in the post-post apocalypse...I mean that was straight up just a filler episode.
Here's Negan was a good showcase for JDM and Hilarie Burton, and provided some nice shading to Negan, but it also didn't really change our perception of him all that much, you know? It did present a very interesting
divergence from the comic at the end there though, which will be interesting to watch play out next season. We never really got all that much Maggie x Negan stuff in the comic so that should be cool.
I thought this was pretty interesting. It really wasn't a mutual decision to end The Walking Dead and do a spin-off. AMC straight up canceled it.
Was The Walking Dead cancelled? Show star Jeffrey Dean Morgan says the final season announcement was a surprise to the creators and showrunners.
collider.com
I think that's somewhat misleading - they had a 16 episode season 11 "all mapped out", but then AMC "blindsided them" with news that the show would be ending...with an additional 14 episodes (aka almost an entire season's worth of episodes)? He makes it sound like the rug was pulled out from under them and "oh no what do we do" but S11 is going to be super sized and spread out over 2 years AND the main characters are getting a spin off the following year, so...this is about as good an end as any TV show gets.
At any rate, I'm curious to know what their original plans were - there genuinely isn't more than a season's worth of comic material left and even 16 episodes for what they have might be pushing it. Season 10 roughly covered 4 1/2 volumes of the comic (not counting 10.C, which was it's own little thing) and there's only 3 more volumes of the comic left so I guess they were planning on stretching things out quite a bit if they were thinking of possibly doing a full 12th season (and maybe even going beyond that).