Believe it or not, after over a decade on our screens, The Walking Dead is finally drawing to a close with season 11. Not many TV shows get to endure that long. And if there’s one thing fans have endlessly debated over the years, it’s how the series will end. Will there be a cure? Who will survive? Will our group finally find a place they can call home?
Showrunner Angela Kang talked about the series finale to Syfy Wire, in the least spoiler-y way possible. She revealed that the team has worked immensely hard to do justice to every character, both those who have been around for a long time and recent additions.
“Without getting into too much specifics, for us it is important to try to give these characters moments to shine,” she said. “Not everybody’s gonna have the same amount of screen time and that’s even just on the level of everybody’s actor deal is very different. It makes it like a mathematical puzzle to figure out how to work things out.”
Robert Kirkman’s Walking Dead comic series ended in 2019. In the final issue (SPOILER alert), an older Carl Grimes wanders around a safe community called the Grimes family farm. We recognize a lot of people named after characters from earlier on in the series. In the TV show, Carl has been killed off, so ending the show like the comics is impossible.
But Kang has the utmost respect for the books, so she can at least keep the themes in place:
"We always start with the comic as our basis. But there’s a fair amount of just riffing off of that too because we have a different array of characters that are in the books at the end. We’ve got different directions that the story has gone so we’re definitely in a parallel universe from the comics. But we’ve thought a lot about what we think the story from the comics was about and what the show has been trying to say."
Writing an ending to a series so beloved comes with a lot of pressure. As the writers of Game of Thrones will tell you, pleasing everyone is very difficult. “We can only make it and then put it out in the world and hope that at least emotionally people find some resonance in it,” Kang said. “That’s the best any creator can do because at a certain point, it belongs to the audience.”
The Walking Dead series finale script outline
Fans of the show burst into tears earlier in the week when crew member Tommie Turvey shared an image of the script outline for the final episode. Rather than the closing line reading “End of Episode,” it instead reads, “End of Series.”
As Walking Dead writer Corey Reed pointed out on Twitter, this is not the finished script, it’s an outline of it. But still, those words are super emotional to read. Check out the image here.
The Walking Dead returns for more of its final season on February 20. You can watch episodes one week early if you’re an AMC+ subscriber.
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