Spoilers below for The Walking Dead's latest episode, and possible spoilers for the next one.
The end of The Walking Dead's latest season is nigh, and fans still have an abundance of questions about how the All Out War will conclude. But before any of those issues get addressed, we have to witness the aftermath of "Still Gotta Mean Something," which includes discovering the mystery passenger that Negan picked up at the end of the episode. Surprisingly, AMC itself may have revealed the answer in new images promoting the next episode, titled "Worth," and it appears ol' Gregory was the sight for sore eyes catching a ride back to the Sanctuary.
In still form, this reveal technically can't be confirmed, but the image below does show Gregory once again standing around and being a complete turd within the Sanctuary's walls, even though we haven't seen him there in a while.
That one picture raises several different questions, though some of them were already present before the picture came around. (Such as "When is Negan going to blow up on Simon?") It's still a question of whether Gregory was the one Negan picked up on the side of the road, but it all fits. He'd be alone and looking worse for wear, since he has all the survival skills of a dry sponge. And he'd have some very interesting things to tell Negan that would further inspire the big bad's plan to surprise his Savior underlings.
The last time we saw Gregory, he was making a yellow-bellied escape from the Hilltop after Henry's revenge mission got completely upended. The easy bet would have been that he'd stick with the heinous Jared and that group, but he was nowhere to be seen when Rick and Morgan slaughtered those in-the-wind Saviors. While many of us just wished he'd been eaten alive by fire ants, it looks like he instead decided to just hoof it back to the Sanctuary, despite Simon deeming him and the other prisoners as expendable. But Negan hadn't even known about that part, since he was presumably in Jadis' care when that went down.
So Gregory's initial impact would likely come by way of sharing everything that went down at the Hilltop, from Maggie's treatment of them to Simon's attack to the escape. Which is bad news for Simon, who hasn't really done anything to please Negan in quite a while. It's unclear if Gregory knows about the Saviors who chose to stay behind, but he certainly saw how Alden and Maggie spoke to each other, so he probably has suspicions. All in all, even though Gregory is a villain by most intents and purposes, his return to the Sanctuary should actually be much more damaging to the Saviors than anything or anyone else.
Perhaps a downside to this scenario is that comic book fans likely won't see any of Gregory's more interesting source material moments coming to life on the TV show. There was some real meat to the non-physical battle between him and Maggie on the page, and I'd half-hoped that his stay within Hilltop's makeshift prison meant there was still hope. And sure, those stories can still play out under different circumstances, with different characters, but it'd be better to see Xander Berkeley's ham-tastic performances for them.
So while Negan's nighttime passenger probably isn't as exciting as we'd hoped, Gregory might be just the character to cause the Saviors to implode. The Walking Dead airs Sunday nights on AMC at 9:00 p.m. ET. Check out what we think about Eugene's chances of surviving Season 8, and head to our midseason premiere schedule and our summer premiere schedule.
