The Walking Dead showrunner talks season 11 and Maggie’s return

Fans have seen every episode of The Walking Dead season 10 but one: the team couldn’t finish post-production on the season finale thanks to the coronavirus, meaning that the penultimate episode, “The Tower,” had to serve as stand-in. AMC has promised to air the real finale, ” A Certain Doom,” later this year. When that happens, we’ll see the survivors of Alexandria, Oceanside, the Kingdom and Hilltop make their heroic last stand against the Whisperers — led by Beta (Ryan Hurst) — and their massive horde of walkers.

What can fans expect when that day finally comes? “Okay, we know that Beta is maybe not in the best shape, and he’s hell-bent on revenge,” showrunner Angela Kang told ComicBook.com. “His Alpha is dead and he’s still wearing half her face. I think that our people and Beta and the Whisperers, they’re all on a collision course and it’s finally all going to come to an epic head.”

The preview for that final episode revealed that Lauren Cohan will return as Maggie, last scene in season 9. She abruptly left the show after Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) was presumably killed (although he was actually airlifted to safety by a mysterious group), and we don’t know what she’s been doing since.

“We’ll see Maggie come into the show, and… There’s not much I can say without being spoiler-y,” Kang teased. “But Maggie is part of the heart of these people’s lives. There’s so much love for her within our communities, and she was a leader at a time when so much of the leadership at Hilltop had been lost. Even as we’re working on season 11, we’ve got so much great stuff planned for her. So I’m just excited for her to be back in the family and for us to do more great stuff with Maggie.”

But as exciting as that will be, there’s a lot more to the finale. “Carol feels like she’s got a lot to make up for,” Kang said. “She’ll be stepping up. We obviously have Daryl in a position of leadership. And Beta, and Negan, there’s a lot of people with a lot of beef against each other, so that’s all going to come to a head, too.”

"We’ll see Gabriel stepping up as a leader and being in some perilous situations. Everybody is going to do what they do best as heroes and fight in the face of impossible odds. It’s a big, action-packed adventure for everybody when we come back."

As far as season 11 goes, Kang and her team are able to work from home, so hopefully, there will be no production delay and it can premiere in October as planned. “Writing, I think, is the easiest process to do remotely, and even that is a little… It’s tricky,” Kang said. “We’re not quite able to work at the same exact pace as we would when we’re in the office, but we were very close to finishing [“A Certain Doom”]. We usually deliver the episodes for a big effects-heavy episode about two weeks before we air. We were about a week and a half out at the point which California shut down.”

So the season 10 finale is going to be a “big effects-heavy” episode? That tracks, especially if you factor in what will likely be the largest horde of walkers the show has ever assembled in one place. In the comics, the Whisperer horde is so large that it fills a small city to capacity, with the undead packed in shoulder to rotting shoulder.

“What is continuing remotely is the effects that can be finished, but even after all of that’s done, all the shots need to be laid in,” Kang said. “There’s a color process that needs machines to be finished. There’s sound work that we usually do on the Warner Brothers stage, and that’s very complex mixing equipment that you can’t just move into somebody’s house overnight. And multiple people work on that.”

"So we’re very, very close to finishing. I think actually, by the time the world is safe for people to start venturing out, probably all of the effects will be done, and then it’s just a handful of processes and it can be turned around very, very quickly. We’re very hopeful that we can get it all done very rapidly once we’re back up and running."

Ryan Hurst as Beta – The Walking Dead _ Season 10, Episode 14 – Photo Credit: Jackson Lee Davis/AMC

The Walking Dead boss Scott Gimple echoed Kang in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “Like everyone else, once we’re given the all clear, we’re ready to roar back,” he said. “Just like with everybody else, it’s this weird moment of pause. There are so many people who work on these shows. Between the three shows, we’re talking about [numbering] in the thousands. We want everyone safe and healthy. That’s the deal. We all have to pull together to make sure everyone is safe and healthy.”

"All the shows are in some degree or another of writing. Fear the Walking Dead didn’t have a ton of writing left, but a good amount of it. We’re cooking on [writing The Walking Dead] Season 11. People were starting to peel off and write their scripts, and that’s moving along. Post can work remotely to a degree. There’s a good amount of work on all of the shows that needed to be done in rooms, and we’re still doing that, just not together."

The Walking Dead season 10 has been highly enjoyable, so I’m hoping production can pick right back up when it’s safe.

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