Lauren Cohan (Maggie) ready to shoot six “extra” Walking Dead episodes

After taking some time off, Lauren Cohen (Maggie) will again be a part of The Walking Dead, including the “extra” six episodes of season 10. What’s their deal?

The end of The Walking Dead is officially on the horizon, but we’ve still got 31 episodes to go before the show comes to a close.

Six of these episodes are being tacked onto the end of our current season 10, and will air in January. At the moment we don’t know much about these extra episodes,  but Lauren Cohan (Maggie) recently revealed a few details.

Maggie left the show in the season 9 episode “What Comes After,” the same episode where Andrew Lincoln (Rick Grimes) made his last appearance. But both of them are coming back to the franchise: Lincoln will appear in a series of movies, and Cohan will return as Maggie in the season 10 finale on October 4, after spending time offscreen traveling with Georgie helping out communities in need.

And that will lead into the extra six episodes. “I’m in Georgia now getting ready to shoot,” she said on Live with Kelly and Ryan, “which is now going to be part of the still season 10. We’re doing this big chunk of episodes, and then next year we come back and do 24 more…We have two calendar years’ worth of stuff to shoot, so it’s still going to be on television for a significant period, but I feel two ways about it.”

It’s possible that these six additional episodes could chronicle what Maggie was up to while she was gone. Or they could just could just show us what happens to the newly reconstituted gang after the final confrontation with the Whisperers.

The revelation that The Walking Dead is ending has rattled a lot of fans, but Cohan is actually pretty okay with it, describing the news as “bittersweet.”

"I kind of got excited when we first announced [it was ending], just because fans and everybody who’s watched all this time and been part of our invested family is… We’re so lucky we’ve been going so long and it’s so exciting to say, ‘Okay, let’s all key in for this final season and watch it together’, and it makes me appreciate it."

She’s also keen on the idea of spinoff shows, of which there are several on the way. “And then, people are so hungry for our whole universe still that it’s exciting because there will be spin-off possibilities.”

Despite the flagship show ending, the franchise is far from finished. In addition to Fear the Walking Dead, which is well into its life, AMC is working on a spinoff following Daryl (Norman Reedus) and Carol (Melissa McBride) as well as an anthology series titled Tales of The Walking Dead. Then you’ve got the Rick Grimes movies and The Walking Dead: World Beyond, a show about the first generation of kids to come of age during the zombie apocalypse. That one will premiere on the same night as the season 10 finale, “A Certain Doom.”

So there’s lots going on even before the curtain falls on The Walking Dead, not to mention after, and we can’t wait to see Maggie’s part in it.

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