Last Day on Earth (TV Series)

"Last Day on Earth" is the sixteenth and final episode of Season 6 of AMC's The Walking Dead. It aired with a 90 minute premiere on April 3, 2016 at 9/8c on AMC, and on April 4, 2016 at 9pm on Fox.

Plot Synopsis
Light streams through holes in the wall of an unknown, pitch-black room. Heavy breathing comes from inside. Muffled voices can be heard outside.

Morgan continues his search for Carol. He finds a horse – presumably the one the man they encountered at the barn was looking for -- in the middle of a field.

The Savior who survived the encounter with Carol follows her tracks. He grasps Carol’s rosary beads.

A man flees through the woods. Saviors whistle all around him. The Saviors catch up to the man and take him captive. The group’s leader tells the captive that his people at the library had to die because they broke the rules. The Saviors beat the man.

Carl urgently packs guns into his bag. He and Rick are planning to take Maggie to the Hilltop for medical care. Enid begs to come along but Carl refuses. Rick meanwhile loads more bags into the RV. Sasha, Abraham and Eugene insist on joining as well.

Enid pleads with Carl to join the group. He locks her in the armory. Enid screams at Carl, asking what will happen if Carl and the others don’t return. “Just survive somehow,” he says, echoing her personal mantra.

Rick works on the RV. Aaron, too, insists on accompanying him to the Hilltop. Rick relents. Gabriel  updates Rick on the safety measures that he’s implemented in case the Saviors attack while Rick is gone. “I will not fail you,” Gabriel says. The RV departs with Rick, Carl, Abraham, Sasha, Eugene, Aaron and a bedridden Maggie on board.

Morgan rides the horse through a town and spots Carol huddled on a stoop. He inspects a knife wound on her torso.

The Saviors drag their captive onto the road. “This is us about to make an example out of you,” says the leader. They stand in the middle of the road, waiting.

Maggie lies in the back of the RV. Rick assures her the doctor at the Hilltop will be able to help. “As long as it’s all of us, we can do anything,” he says.

Morgan dresses Carol’s wound inside a library. He proposes they leave for Alexandria at dawn so that she can get stitches and antibiotics. She refuses.

Abraham slows the RV to a stop as they run into the Saviors’ blockade on the road.

Rick’s group steps out of the RV. Rick puts his hands up and offers to make a deal. “Give us all your stuff,” the leader commands. Rick refuses before getting back in the RV to turn around. “What if it’s the last day on Earth for you?” the leader asks before Rick leaves. “Maybe you should be extra nice to those people in that RV. Because you never know.”

Back in the dark room, the heavy breathing continues.

In the RV, Carl asks Aaron why he didn’t stay back and help guard Alexandria. “I owe her,” Aaron says of Maggie. “I owe them,” Carl says of the Saviors.

Eugene studies a map with Sasha to figure out an alternate route to the Hilltop. He finds a path that’s longer but offers long-range visibility.

At the library, Carol explains to Morgan that she cares about Rick’s group, which means she would kill to protect them. “If you don’t want to kill, or if you can’t, then you have to get away from them. You do not get both,” she says. She orders him to leave, briefly raising her gun at him. But then she wearily lowers it, knowing she doesn’t have it in her to fire.

As Abraham drives the RV, he tells Sasha he’s ready to bring new life into the world. She smiles.

Rick’s group encounters another, larger, gang of Saviors blocking the road. Rick sees that they’re outnumbered and tells Abraham to turn around. A Savior fires his rifle in the air as they retreat.

Outside the library, Morgan finds a walker dangling from a noose. He stabs it in the head then cuts it loose. Back inside, he finds no sign of Carol. He gallops down the road on his horse to track her down.

The RV encounters yet another roadblock: this time, a line of walkers chained together across the road. The group gets out to investigate. Aaron notices that one of the walkers has two of Michonne’s dreadlocks stapled to it, and Sasha notices Daryl’s crossbow bolts embedded through another walker’s chest. Saviors fire at them from the woods. Rick cuts the chain, letting the walkers loose. They pile into the RV and drive forward.

Back on the move, Rick notes that the Saviors were only firing at their feet. “They want us in this direction,” he realizes. Aaron informs Rick that Maggie’s fever is worsening. They soon come upon a still larger roadblock of Saviors in the road and, once again, turn around.

Rick sits by Maggie’s side and tells her the Saviors are gone. “I believe in you, Rick,” she says.

In a nearby town, Morgan spots Carol’s rosary beads on the ground near a freshly killed walker. Meanwhile, the injured Savior finally catches up with Carol and shoots her in the arm. He says he plans to watch her die, slowly. Morgan arrives and orders him to stop. When the Savior refuses, Morgan shoots him multiple times in the chest, killing him. Carol begs Morgan to let her go. Two men wearing armor approach on horseback: one of them is the man from the barn. Morgan shakes his hand, and he agrees to get Carol medical assistance.

Rick’s group encounters a giant wall of logs blocking the road. As they investigate, the Saviors hang the captive from a nearby overpass. Rick stops Aaron from shooting the captive’s noose, saying they need to conserve bullets. The man chokes to death. Meanwhile the logs erupt in flames. Rick’s group returns to the RV and turns around.

As the survivors debate their next move, Eugene points out that the Saviors are probably looking for the RV and might not expect them to travel by foot.

After nightfall, Rick and Eugene go over the plan: Eugene will drive the empty RV to lure the Saviors. Eugene hands Rick a recipe for making bullets, in the event that he gets killed. “You’re a survivor,” Abraham tells Eugene. They hug.

Rick’s group carries a very weak Maggie into the woods on a stretcher. Eugene gets in the RV.

Marching through the woods, the survivors suddenly hear whistles coming from every direction. They’re surrounded by Saviors. Eugene, too, has been captured. The head Savior from earlier takes their weapons and forces them to their knees.

Inside the dark room, which we now realize is a van, we hear the leader talking to Rick’s group outside. Dwight opens the van and drags out Glenn, Michonne, Rosita and a wounded but alive Daryl. Dwight kneels them down with the others.

A man wearing a leather jacket and a red scarf steps out of a nearby RV. In his hand is a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire. “I’m Negan,” he says to Rick. “You work for me now. You have shit, you give it to me.” He explains that he’s letting them live so that they can work for him, but warns that he has to “beat the holy hell” out of one of them as punishment for killing his men. “This is Lucille,” he says of the bat. “And she is awesome.”

“Eeny, meeny, miny, moe,” he begins, pointing Lucille down the line of survivors. “And you… are… it,” he finishes. Negan warns the group not to move or say anything. “You can breathe, you can blink, you can cry,” he says, raising the bat. “Hell, you’re all going to be doing that.”

Negan’s bat crashes down on one of the survivors again and again. Screams echo through the night.

Other Cast
Special Guest Star
 * Jeffrey Dean Morgan as Negan

Co-Stars

 * Dahlia Legault as Francine
 * Kevin Patrick Murphy as "Male Survivor"
 * Daniel Newman as "The Man"

Deaths

 * Roman
 * Library survivor
 * Unknown survivor of Rick's group

Trivia

 * First appearance of Negan.
 * First appearance of Lucille.
 * Last appearance of Roman
 * This episode is adapted from Issue 100 of Image Comics' The Walking Dead.
 * This episode marks Danai Gurira's 50th appearance on the show.
 * This is the second season finale to be 90 minutes long, after "Conquer".
 * It is the sixth 90 minute episode overall, after "Days Gone Bye", "What Lies Ahead", "Conquer", "First Time Again", and "Here's Not Here".
 * Andrew Lincoln was quoted as saying about the finale, "It was the first day in the whole six years of working on The Walking Dead that I was late for work because I woke up in the middle of the night and I couldn't get back to sleep. I was so angry and frustrated and I felt sick. And that was just after reading it" implying a significant event will happen in this episode. Lauren Cohan also said, "[Hearing] the word 'Finale' gives me a physical reaction because it's the hardest day on set that I've ever had in my life. I never even imagined that as an actor you could have that experience. It's one of the most raw experiences that I think any of us have ever had. Andy talks about being late to work; I didn't want to go to work that day. It took a really, really long time for everybody to feel okay again after the finale, let's put it that way".
 * According to various official TV guides, the original title for this episode was "Something to Fear", but was changed for unknown reasons.
 * This is the first episode of The Walking Dead to air in April worldwide.
 * It is left ambiguous who is killed by Negan at the end of the episode.