It has been a year of politics and deaths. A year people believe will go down in infamy as, you know, the bottom of the barrel. So many beloved figures passed away; so much populist anger turning a familiar world upside down.
Villain of the year is Negan on The Walking Dead. Talk about death and politics. He's the ultimate leader for these times and brutal death is his business. There are times when television serves up a figure that's a perfect emblem of our times, and Negan is it. A long-winded dictator, strutting around with his phallic baseball bat, strangely pursuing his own perverse version of "honour" and at all times a businessman, anxious to keep production numbers up, up, up.
The Walking Dead ends its fall-season run this Sunday and what it has delivered in the recent episodes has driven some loyal followers bonkers. All that violence in the opening episode of this season, much-admired characters killed off and, dominating everything, Jeffrey Dean Morgan's masterful portrayal of the leering, bat-wielding ruler of the appalling world the main characters now occupy.
All the threads of the story are pulled together for Sunday's climactic episode – don't read on if you haven't caught up – in which a multitude of characters have set out to kill Negan. Not that they will, at this juncture. There is never an easy escape or solution on the show.
But the main reason Negan is such a powerful figure is that he commands an army of followers. He's a leader who commands intense loyalty among his group, called The Saviors, and his mission is to corral as many people as possible into being saved and serving as slaves to his will.
His political mantra was declared in last Sunday's episode. "We bring civilization back to this world. We are the Saviors, but we can't do that without rules. Rules are what make it all work." That was just before he took a red-hot iron to some guy's face. Public punishment is his thing, an age-old tactic that is, well, still being used by powerful political figures today.
After inflicting the punishment, Negan turned to Carl, the boy rebel he had captured, and grinned. "Some crazy shit, huh? You probably think I'm a lunatic," he announced with emphatic cheer.
What makes Negan villain of the year isn't the violence he inflicts. It's the greasy charm of him. Anyone following the show knows the greasy charm is just as sinister as the brute force.
Last Sunday's episode was particularly loaded with suggestions that a parable is unfolding and Negan is, to his bloodstained boots, a politician parading before us. Taking Carl to Alexandria, a place he now views as part of his constituency, he found the major characters there were missing. So he got cozy to await their return. Having time, instead of upstanding people, to kill, he settled in.
First, he proposed killing time by having sex with the nearest woman, Olivia. "I think it would be enjoyable to screw your brains out. I mean, if you're agreeable to it," he suggested with the kind of lecherous gravitas that power bestows. Rebuffed, he carried on regardless.
His next act was to do what all politicians do – that campaign cliché of baby kissing. He sat on the porch with the tiny, vulnerable Judith on his knee. He had some lemonade. The scene, a malignant caricature of family life, was more frightening than that bloody bat being swung. And Negan's closing words to Carl were: "Maybe it's stupid of me to keep your dad alive. Maybe I should bury you both in the flower beds. And I could just settle in the suburbs."
There's the rub – "settle in the suburbs." A viewer can extrapolate all kinds of possible meanings from The Walking Dead. Heck, you can find treatises about the series in Psychology Today magazine. Some of its ruminations and lessons are shallow, and others aren't.
But the manner in which Negan has been fleshed out, from ghoul to grandstanding, baby-kissing, repellent but compelling eminence, is mind-blowing. Villain of the year in 2016, this year of politics, easily.