Unless you’ve been living under a rock, it should be widely known that the seventh season of “The Walking Dead” premiered last Sunday October 21, and has had a huge emotional impact on fans everywhere.

The show has had a successful run for the past six years, and has enchanted audiences everywhere with the concept of headstrong, yet lovable characters surviving an apocalypse where other humans pose more of a threat than the actual zombies. It is how long we have known the characters that makes it so much harder to let them go.

The show’s tendency of killing off main characters is known to all fans, and the brutality that comes with it takes second place in comparison to “Game of Thrones”. The new season’s premiere had a very brutal and anguishing start, perhaps one of the most messed up deaths in the show. Two major characters were murdered in the most awful way possible, and the effect it had on the other characters in the show was absolutely heartbreaking to watch. Watching the murders of two major characters you’ve grown with through the years is not easy, especially when the one responsible for them is the worst villain yet.

If you thought the Governor was bad, he seems tame in comparison to Negan’s vicious rule. What makes the new villain of the series so horrifying is the fact that he’s not a madman, but a charismatic and collected character. He jokes around and he claims he’s trying to be nice at times, but when he brings out a barb-wired wrapped bat named Lucille, you know he means business. There will now forever by a twinge in pain in the hearts of Walking Dead fans whenever Lucille is mentioned.

Despite the trauma-inducing premiere of the season, the second episode was much lighter and easier to watch. It is now a tradition on the show to follow up a heartbreaking episode with a much lighter one to bring the audience back to their senses, and that’s exactly what the second episode of the season did.

It gave the audience a break from experiencing heartbreak all over again by focusing on two other main characters that were thankfully not present during the meeting and introduction of Negan. It introduced some new characters that will undoubtedly soon become fan favorites, along with an awesome tiger that already has audiences mesmerized.

But the second episode also importantly alluded to aspects of hope and perhaps even revenge for the future of the lovable cast of characters. One can only hope that after all the hardships the characters have faced, that they will somehow be able to find peace in the end one way or another.

The beginning of the season may have been painful to watch, but it was also a very strong start. It guarantees more than anything that fans are in for a wild and terrifying ride. One of my favorite aspects of the show is that it centers around the idea that humans are their own worst enemy, and this season will definitely shed more light on that idea than any othe season in the show’s past.