Alright. It's been about a week of hemming and hawing over what happened in the Season 7 premiere of The Walking Dead, so the climate is a bit better now to talk about the episode without the needle-prick reaction to the deaths of Steven Yeun's Glenn and Abraham (Michael Cudlitz). First of all, it's a pretty ballsy episode of television. The entire episode was essentially carried by Jeffrey Dean Morgan's Negan, Rick's long-awaited true nemesis, who went about following through on his promise of dispatching with one of Rick's crew and doing the same if anyone tried to stop him. There was one excursion out of the wooded area, but for the most part, we were in the same place where we left off.

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Image via AMC

The controversy about the episode seems to be over a construed belief that Glenn's death was particularly rough, to the point where words like cruel and sadistic are being thrown around by innumerable viewers. Some fans simply gave up on the show, which is frankly ridiculous. Glenn's death, though quite memorable, was not, by any measure of the word, the most egregious death in the series. That dubious honor goes to Tyler James Williams' Noah, which the show seemed to genuinely relish watching get literally torn apart by zombies, complete with pleas for help and dying screams. In comparison, Glenn's death was certainly rough to watch, but his loss was more marked by our emotional connection to him at this point in the series than the horror of his end. That's ignoring the argument that a character as major as Glenn requires a big death, not just a simple bite on the arm or a sword to the throat.

Was it the best episode of the series? Far from it, but the freaking uproar over, when you get down to it, a show about people running away from psychopaths and zombies would make you think a large portion of the US populace was forced to watch Visitor Q and A Serbian Film back to back last Sunday. Thankfully, the LEGO corporation and one tremendously talented animator are here to add some levity to a situation that is in desperate need of just that thing. Today, an animator who goes by Kristo499 uploaded an animated remake of key scenes from last week's episode with modded LEGO figures, and it is a true delight, if you can get over all the LEGO gore. You can watch the clip right below, which might be preferable to re-watching the premiere in anticipation of the next episode. That is, unless you're amongst those who can no longer stand the horror show showing you some genuine horror.

Here's the video:

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