After nearly 12 years, and 11 seasons, AMC’s venerable zombie hit The Walking Dead is coming to a close with eight final episodes, which will begin broadcasting on Sunday, October 2. And though there’s always pressure with a finale, ending a series that essentially redefined television is no easy task.
“The pressure is, it’s pretty insane,” The Walking Dead showrunner Angela Kang told Decider. “But The Walking Dead has always been a show where, every person who is involved, from the writers, to the actors, to the crew, everybody’s always like, ‘we want to make this the best we can make it.’ So in some ways, we are so used to trying to push things forward and do things that are new and continue to entertain the viewer that it was more like a amped up version of what we do anyway.”
The cast Decider talked to all agreed that the final episodes were essentially business as usual. “There’s always a pressure, it doesn’t matter if it’s the middle of the season, in the middle of the series or if it’s a finale,” Josh McDermitt, who has played Eugene since Season 4, noted. But weighing over them was the idea that finales, by their very nature, are going to be fractious.
“Even Seinfeld, one of my favorite shows, that was wildly inflammatory to a lot of viewers,” Ross Marquand, who has played Aaron since Season 5, added. “M*A*S*H and Friends and even Breaking Bad, every show that’s ever been is going to have to rest on the laurels of its finale. At the end of the day, I really hope people like our finale because we put a lot of work into this season. It was 15 months in a row and, we were very exhausted by the end of it. So I hope people dig it.”
The pressure of crafting the perfect finale was certainly something that was discussed in the writers room, too, as Kang explained. But as much as the staff talked over other finales and premieres with what Kang called her “homework brain,” what they kept coming back to was the original source material for the series.
“You don’t want to copy what anyone else did, it has to work for your show,” Kang said. “We thought a lot about, what is it that we think Robert [Kirkman] was setting out to do in the comic books, emotionally? What was kind of the story he was telling? We think it was a story about family, and about the hope that you can carve out in an open world… This show has always started from a place of, what are the themes, and who are the people, and the relationships that we’re featuring… What is this about from like a heart perspective? And so that’s the only way that we know how to do it. Hopefully it works.”
As The Walking Dead enters the third part of its longest season of all time — Season 11 stretches over 24 episodes, broken into three, eight episode long chunks — the conflict is also more complicated than ever before. After years of surviving on their own, our post-apocalyptic heroes have tentatively become part of a society known as The Commonwealth. This new home has a coordinated military, a massive safe haven with thousands of survivors, and best of all: ice cream.
But true to the series, not all is right in The Commonwealth. Unlike previous societies that have ranged from fascistic, to sadistic, to cannibalistic, The Commonwealth is unique in that it can’t let go of the past… Instead of embracing the new world of the zombie apocalypse, The Commonwealth continues the wealth disparity that existed before the world started to end. And that, of course, doesn’t sit right with our heroes, who have previously formed a more egalitarian society.
At the center of that conflict, at least in the first two episodes screened for critics, titled “Lockdown” and “A New Deal”, is Josh Hamilton’s Lance Hornsby. Hornsby, like the Commonwealth, is an atypical villain for the franchise, more focused on proving his worth and climbing the governmental ladder; his techniques more mental, than physical.
“Lance, he’s not a cannibal, he’s not a total sociopath, he’s just ambitious, maybe slightly morally directionless, although he doesn’t think that,” Hamilton told Decider. “He believes in the message of The Commonwealth and he’s trying to do what he thinks is right… He thinks he’s capable, and wants the position of power that he’s going after… Like any villain, he doesn’t think of himself as a bad guy, he has absolute, clear reasons for doing what he does. Other people might feel differently, but it’s not really his problem.”
Lance will be a major problem for our main characters; particularly Daryl Dixon (Norman Reedus) and Maggie Rhee (Lauren Cohan), who have both become thorns in his side. And because his ambitions have turned into vendetta, it’s only a matter of time before Hornsby’s warped perspective turns to the Commonwealth itself, and its politically minded leader, Pamela Milton (Laila Robins).
Still, given these eight episodes are getting started, it might be best not to get too attached to Lance Hornsby as The Walking Dead‘s final boss. “You never know what twists and turns are going to unfold over the season,” Kang teased. “So keep watching and see where that goes.”
Whoever that ultimate enemy is, we’ll have to wait eight weeks to find out. But for the cast, that finale has been an even longer wait than for the viewers: filming wrapped back in March, meaning most of them haven’t seen each other in months, after spending more than a year together filming the final season. Happily, the cast noted there were plans in the works to bring them all back together for a finale viewing party — something that will be a boon to actors like Nadia Hilker, who have not yet wrapped their heads around the show being over.
“I still really, truly believe that we’re returning to Senoia [Georgia] to continue filming,” Hilker, who has played Magna since Season 9 said. “It hit me somewhat when I left base camp on my last episode. But I think I still haven’t realized it yet. It never felt like an ending-ending.”
And it’s not. Not really. Like any good zombie, the TWD franchise will continue to shamble along. Including Fear the Walking Dead, which is entering its eighth season, and the TBD status of anthology series Tales of the Walking Dead, at least three other spinoffs are in the works. They’ll center on popular characters like Maggie and Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), who are headed off to Manhattan in a new series titled Dead Island; a Paris-set series featuring Daryl Dixon, who Kang noted fans may want to “keep an eye on” in the final episodes of TWD; and one reuniting fan-favorites Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) and Michonne (Danai Gurira) in what TWD Universe head described at a recent AMC press day as an “epic love story” set in “a world unlike we’ve ever seen in The Walking Dead.”
But for fans of the mothership series, don’t expect the Walking Dead finale to be nothing but setup for even more shows. As Kang explained, it was about bringing things to a satisfying finish, even if the world will continue.
“Our goal was always to bring closure to the series,” Kang said. “But, the interesting thing is, the comic book itself – there is closure, but it also leaves a door open, which I think kind of goes with the vibe of ‘this is the zombie story that never ends.’ That’s one of the underlying ideas of the comic, so I’ll say that it pays homage to that. But for people who’ve been watching the show, it was really really important to us to feel like the characters come to a landing place… Those that make it to the end.”
The Walking Dead returns to AMC for its final eight episodes on Sunday, October 2 at 9/8c, with new episodes streaming a week early on AMC+.
