Recruiting King Ezekiel to join forces for a potentially unwinnable battle is no easy feat, but Rick pulls out an old parable that plants the seed of acquiescence in season seven.
His metaphor-ing is pretty precise — he talks about how the road to a kingdom (wink!) lay marred with a massive rock that cost people their lives and livelihood and yet had never been moved. Think of the rock as Negan, and it all makes so much sense. Finally, one girl whose family's trade caravan is destroyed by the obstruction decided to do something about it to prevent others from getting hurt, and she reaped a massive reward as a result.
"She dug at that rock in the road with her hands until they bled, used everything she had to pull it out," he explains. "Took hours. In the end, when she was going to fill it up, she saw something in it; it was a bag of gold. The king put that rock in the road because he knew the person who dug it out, who did something, they deserved a reward. They deserved to have their life changed for the good, forever."
The message is clear: "Move that rock!"
