Is that love in the air on Dead City, or is it just walker stench?
With the prevalence of the enemies-to-lovers trope in media today, it’s perhaps not surprising that a certain subset of The Walking Dead fans hopes to see longtime enemies Maggie Rhee (Lauren Cohan) and Negan Smith (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) end up in… something. Love? Lust? A blood-soaked embrace? It’s difficult to say.
What’s not difficult to sense is the chemistry between Cohan and Morgan, even when Maggie and Negan are holding knives to each other’s throats, leaving each other to die, and generally making each other miserable. With spinoff Dead City arriving on Netflix and Season 2 set to premiere in May, we decided to take a look back at one of the TWDU’s most fascinatingly fraught relationships, and to ask the question: Could Negan and Maggie ever actually happen?
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What happened between Maggie and Negan on The Walking Dead?
First, the obvious: Negan brutally kills Maggie’s husband, Glenn (Steven Yeun), in the Season 7 premiere, bashing his skull in with a barbed-wire baseball bat. The iconic, gory scene no doubt lives forever in the minds of Walking Dead fans… and it lives forever in poor Maggie’s mind, too. Making matters worse, Maggie was pregnant at the time.
Maggie spends the war with the Saviors convinced that Negan should die for what he did. In the end, Rick (Andrew Lincoln) makes the decision to keep Negan alive and imprisoned in Alexandria. This enrages Maggie. Quietly, she plans revenge. However, in Season 9, she comes around on Rick’s choice… if not his mercy. She decides not to end Negan’s life even after the suffering, sobbing man pleads with her to do so. :I came to kill Negan,” she tells him, “and you’re already worse than dead.”
Things take a turn, however, when Maggie and Negan are forced to work together in the show’s final season. Maggie eventually leaves her role as leader of Hilltop to lead a community called Meridian, but when Meridian falls, she returns to Alexandria. Alexandria starts to run out of food, so Maggie offers to lead a supply run to what remains of Meridian and bring back whatever food is still there… and Negan joins her. Mistrust and tension run high between the two, but Negan saves Maggie during an ambush by the villainous Reapers, and then again at the Reapers’ compound. Throughout the mission and afterward, while Maggie never gets to a point where she forgives Negan, she does reach a point where she can be okay with him surviving and having a life outside of his cell.
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Do Maggie and Negan get together in the comics?
In the comics, Maggie and Negan’s relationship is decidedly less nuanced than on the show and absolutely not romantic. The Maggie-led supply run never happens, and they don’t go on a mission to New York City. Maggie’s hatred for Negan during and after All Out War remains, though, and she’s still incensed when Negan’s allowed to go free after the Whisperer War instead of remaining in his cell for the rest of his life.
However, their animosity in the source material concludes with a similar tone as the scene between Maggie and Negan in Season 9 of the show. In the comics, Rick allows Negan to leave Alexandria after he helps defeat the Whisperers. Maggie tracks Negan down, and they have a confrontation. Negan, now in possession of a remade Lucille (which also happened in the show after he lost the original), tells Maggie she can kill him the same way he killed Glenn and that he won’t fight her. When she refuses, he tries to get her to shoot him; again, she refuses. Maggie tells him he has to live with what he did and that he doesn’t get to have what he wants: death as an escape from his pain.
Where did Maggie and Negan leave off in Dead City?
In Dead City, Maggie and Negan go to New York City to rescue Maggie’s son, Hershel, who’d been taken by the Croat (Zeljiko Ivanek). A former Savior who Negan exiled for his brutality, the Croat offers Maggie a deal: He’ll return Hershel in exchange for Negan. Maggie accepts the deal, but when he learns of her plan, Negan fights her. After an initial scuffle, Negan acknowledges that he and Maggie could’ve saved Hershel together because they make a “badass team,” but he does allow her to trade him for her son. Rather than killing him, the Croat brings Negan to a woman called the Dama (Lisa Emery), who offers him a chance to return to his past, in a way. She wants him to lead the existing New York groups in a fight against the New Babylon marshals.
Who have Negan and Maggie been paired with in the past?
At this point, at least, Maggie has only ever been with one person on the main show: Glenn. In the comics, Maggie later has a relationship with a former Savior named Dante, and for a bit, it seemed like the show might’ve been ready to place Alden (Callan McAuliffe) in that role — but a romance never happened.
Negan’s love was his late wife, Lucille. Viewers got to meet her in the 22nd episode of Season 10, “Here’s Negan,” where she was played by Morgan’s real-life wife, Hilarie Burton. (Aw.) After Lucille’s death early on in the apocalypse, Negan takes a sort-of harem of attractive “wives,” although he doesn’t appear to love any of them the way he loved Lucille. During the Whisperer War, Negan sleeps with the Whisperers’ leader, Alpha (Samantha Morton), but that memorably gross scene was part of a ruse to earn her trust.
After enough time passes, Negan again finds real love with and marries Annie (Medina Senghore), a leader in a community called Riverbend. During the events of Dead City, she lives in Missouri with her and Negan’s child.
Josh Stringer/AMC
Will Negan and Maggie get together?
While enemies-to-lovers is a massively popular trope in pop culture these days, it’s not likely to apply to Maggie and Negan. They can work together, sure, and as of the main show’s finale, Maggie had arrived at a point where she seemed fine with Negan going about his life in peace with Annie.
At the end of Dead City’s first season, she knows she needs to let go of her hatred for Negan to move forward. It’s a controversial pairing, but it’s not completely out of left field. (After all, some popular fan pairings have never even spoken to each other in their source material.) Cohan and Morgan have obvious chemistry, and their characters share a unique — if incredibly traumatizing for Maggie — connection. Maggie has a dark side of her own, although she’s never gone as dark as Savior-heyday Negan, and Negan understands that side of her, as well as her pragmatism and leadership. If one sets aside the Glenn of it all, impossible as that might be, it could almost work.
With all of that said, it doesn’t appear probable that these two will end up in a romantic relationship. During the airing of the main show, The Walking Dead showrunner Angela Kang made it clear that she never meant to portray any form of will-they-won’t-they. “I think that sometimes strong emotions, in any direction, can cross wires,” she said in a 2021 interview with Business Insider. “With these two, there’s not a romantic intent that we’re doing.”
More recently, Morgan chimed in. In a 2023 interview with Collider, Morgan said the Maggie-Negan shipping amuses him. “I find it fascinating that people are shipping them because when I watched the show and when we were playing these scenes, what’s really fascinating is that she might kill me at any minute, or he may kill her,” he said. “I thought that was more interesting than anything else. But other people look at it like, ‘Oh, hey, they should be together.’ We both are very amused by the whole thing.”
Later in the interview, he says he “doesn’t see that happening any time in the future.” For her part, Cohan said the shipping made her think the world “wants love,” but she implies she doesn’t see it happening, either.
How do you feel about Maggie and Negan’s relationship? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
