The Walking Dead showrunner talks about that shocking twist

The latest episode of The Walking Dead, “Walk With Us,” bought us a huge plot twist from the comics that fans have been waiting for ever since the Whisperers were introduced. Now, showrunner Angela Kang has spoken to Entertainment Weekly to discuss the shocking scene.

Be aware that if you read on from this post, there will be SPOILERS from season 10!

Okay, if you’re still here, we can stop being coy: we’re talking about the scene where Negan kills Alpha, the current big bad offed by the former one.

It looks like Kang was really keen on closely following Robert Kirkman’s comic with this particular storyline. “So first of all this pairing in the comic of Alpha and Negan, it’s one of my favorites parts of the comic and we knew that we wanted to do this story of Negan as the one that ultimately kills Alpha,” she said. “And so how do we do that in the show where it still has that surprising element that we had in the books?”

Kang also had to think about how to include a game-changing scene like this right in the middle of the season. This episode felt a lot like a season finale in many ways. “We really liked the idea of doing this partway through the back half [of the season], not in the finale,” she said.

And, of course, a hugely emotional part of Alpha’s death was that she was prepared to kill her daughter, Lydia. “It felt like Alpha for her side had this kind of epic emotional story with her daughter. And so we wanted to get to a place with the story where we understood that Alpha was ready to kill her own daughter. And that seemed to make sense. It tracked via the rejecting her once and for all.”

As for Negan, well, Kang wanted to play on Negan’s care for children. It’s something we’ve seen in the show before with Carl. He never physically hurt Carl, he only did things he felt necessary to aggrieve Rick. More recently, we also saw him connect with Lydia.

"And then from Negan’s side, we asked ourselves: What is Negan’s red line? And we know that Negan really genuinely seems to care about children. In the books, he was a teacher before the apocalypse began, and we showed him develop this relationship to Lydia. And just the fact that Alpha has this go in and kill everybody, who cares, burn it all down, I’ll kill my own child philosophy —  that really feels like for Negan that’s the red line that he can’t cross. There’s a lot about Alpha that I think would be appealing to him. He obviously is really drawn to the strong, but we felt that to get the most satisfying version of that, that it had to be complicated for Negan too."

Since the episode aired, Samantha Morton (Alpha) also talked to EW, saying that she “hated” filming the shocking scene. She was also asked whether it was filmed using a cast of her head or a greenscreen. “It was a bit of both,” she said. “I did a lot of zombie stuff, and there was a greenscreen, and stuff like that too. So, a bit of both. It was awful, I hated it.” At least it resulted in a fantastic moment!

You can catch new episode of The Walking Dead season 10 on Sundays on AMC!

To stay up to date on everything fantasy, science fiction, and WiC, follow our all-encompassing Facebook page and sign up for our exclusive newsletter.

Watch Game of Thrones for FREE with a no-risk, 7-day free trial of Amazon Channels