The Walking Dead characters will feel “uncomfortable” in the final season

After over a decade on our screens, the eleventh and final season of The Walking Dead is finally here. Given its supersized 24-episode length, the ending is still a ways off, which leaves plenty of time for the show to surprise us. Revolving around a new, gigantic, advanced community unlike anything our survivors have seen before, this season promises a totally fresh outlook. Showrunner Angela Kang believes the myriad additions it’ll leave some of our characters feeling “uncomfortable.”

The season premiere, “Acheron: Part I,” introduced us to the Commonwealth, a community with over 50,000 residents, a powerful military, and a proper town feel — it’s perhaps the closest thing we’ve seen to a pre-apocalypse community.

However, things aren’t quite as sweet as they may appear. Our group has already found itself in the middle of a strange admissions process. As we dive deeper into the season, we’ll learn that there are lots of issues with this civilization.

For now, though, it all looks too good to be true, and it will take some getting used to. “What I’ll say is, there are characters such as Daryl (Norman Reedus) that find themselves in situations that are so different in some ways than ones they’ve been in before,” Kang told Digital Spy.

"So they’re trying to navigate them in ways that can sometimes be uncomfortable for their characters, because they feel like they knew how the world worked, or what their place was in their group, and they’re having to kind of expand beyond their circle. I think in a general sense, that’s kind of what a lot of our characters, in different ways, are dealing with,” she added; but some things never change. And then, of course, there’s scares and all the usual fun stuff that we get to do in our show."

Jeffrey Dean Morgan (Negan) was against mentioning Glenn in The Walking Dead season 11 premiere

Since his time as the major antagonist on The Walking Dead, Negan has made huge strides towards becoming a valuable asset to our group. For example, he killed Alpha during the Whisperer War. However, with Maggie (Lauren Cohan) now back in the picture, it’s going to be hard for him to convince her that he is a changed man.

As if it wasn’t hard enough, Negan made a flippant comment in the season premiere: when he confronts Maggie about whether her taking him with her was all part of a plan to kill him, he says he doesn’t want to be put down like a dog, “like Glenn was.”

Negan, of course, killed Maggie’s husband Glenn several seasons back, so he certainly crossed a line here. Speaking to Entertainment Weekly, Morgan revealed that he didn’t want to say those words:

"I fought it! That’s the one line that I immediately called [showrunner Angela Kang] and I was like, ‘I can’t say it. I can’t f—ing bring up Glenn’s name here.’ And I was like, ‘Any goodwill that Negan has gotten on his side is going to go out the window the minute I say Glenn.’ I tried to nix the line completely. I didn’t think it was necessary. And I thought, for sure, they would let me change it. And so I filmed it three or four different ways. I tried everything else. I said, ‘Your husband’ and other stuff. but ultimately it was like, ‘Well, let’s just try the f—ing Glenn line.’ And then, of course, when I saw the cut, I was like, ‘Oh, f—ers!” [Laughs] They had to put it in.’"

And that wasn’t even the worst thing Negan did towards Maggie in that episode; he also left her for dead at the end. And yet Maggie still conflicted, as actor Lauren Cohen told SyFy Wire:

"Maggie allows herself to hear and witness some of what Negan is saying and open her mind up to it and to say, “OK, he did kill Alpha. And Carol did make decisions she had to make. What, am I going to throw the baby out with the bathwater? There’s going to be nobody f***ing left!” It was like Rick’s point of entry stuff. It’s also what’s happening in the Commonwealth scenes in regards to what do we allow for? The world comes with many, many points of view, as we all know. This season definitely touches on the themes of [the] bigger picture. And I think that’s the compartmentalizing in that I need to find what I have in common. And that’s every day, where I’ve got to run towards where I connect. Run, don’t walk! This piece of you I love, and if I love it hard enough, is it gonna illuminate everything else that we think differently about? And that is what Maggie is trying to get to with Negan. On some fundamental level, I think all these characters know we are not at a point where you can be like, “You snore, so you can’t play.” [Laughs.] It’s fun too because as we proceed into meeting the Commonwealth characters, it’s what’s going to happen there. There’s the good, there’s the bad, but we can we have different points of view, where we’re in the middle? Can we meet and be reasonable? And I like that."

It’s clear that the tension between them is immense. It only feels like a matter of time before blood is shed. Will Negan get his comeuppance?

The Walking Dead season 11 continues Sundays on AMC. For AMC+ subscribers, new episodes air one week early.

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