The Walking Dead is now well into its eleventh and final season, and things are looking great. The franchise will continue for years with various spinoffs and even movies. Recently, the series finale of spinoff The Walking Dead: World Beyond featured a surprise face from the past: Dr. Edwin Jenner (Noah Emmerich).
In the season 1 finale, a fresh-faced Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) leads his band of survivors to the CDC (Center for Disease Control) in the hope of finding a safe haven to wait out the zombie apocalypse. At the doors, they are greeted by Edwin, the only remaining employee in the entire complex, who invites our group to take refuge in the building. Even though he was a highly intelligent scientist, he couldn’t solve the zombie problem, and decides to give our group a “peaceful” death rather than forcing them to face the horrors outside, and begins the self-detonate process at the CDC.
The entire CDC storyline was completely absent from Kirkman’s comics. At the time of making the show, it seemed like a good way to add another layer of depth to the world. However, in hindsight, creator Robert Kirkman recalls one moment in particular he regrets: Jenner’s final words, where he whispered to Rick that everyone is infected with the virus, not just those who are bitten. “It’s in your blood,” he said. “We’re all carriers.”
Robert Kirkman’s Walking Dead mistake led to an expansion of the world
Jenner makes a cameo appearance in The Walking Dead: World Beyond, where he appears on an old tape in a post-credit scene that takes place in France. He seems to imply that there’s a different variant of the zombie virus that can result in the undead being faster and stronger.
With Jenner’s warning fresh in our mind, Kirkman’s old quotes about Jenner’s storyline, and his biggest regret about it, have resurfaced. “If I had to do it again, I wouldn’t have done the CDC episode,” Kirkman revealed to The Hollywood Reporter in 2014. “It possibly gave away too much information and was such a big change very early on in the series. I feel like there might have been a better way to wrap up the first season. It ended up being a fun episode. I love the character of Dr. Jenner and thought Noah did an amazing job. But there were things in that episode that I think seem very much not of The Walking Dead world.”
"probably would have changed that stuff. I’ve been careful in the comic series to not say what’s happening in other parts of the world, but the fact that France is mentioned in that episode and other things like that, I probably would have steered away from that stuff if I had to do it all over again."
Of course, The Walking Dead comics have now gone international. In 2016, comic writer Brian K. Vaughan (Y: The Last Man) created a one-shot comic called The Alien set within The Walking Dead Universe. Set in Barcelona, Spain, it follows Rick Grimes’ brother Jeffrey as he struggles to survive during the beginning of the apocalypse.
Perhaps we’ll get other clues about this new zombie variant when The Walking Dead season 11 returns for its next batch of episodes in 2022. Watch this space!
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