For over a decade, fans of The Walking Dead have been debating how the show will end. Will we finally get a cure for the zombie virus? Which characters will survive? And so on. In a little under a month, on November 20, all questions will be answered.
Of course, Robert Kirkman’s Walking Dead comic book wrapped up in 2019. Given how the TV show has panned out, it’s literally impossible for it to faithfully recreate the comics’ conclusion. On the page, the story skips 25 years into the future, where we see an older, wiser Carl Grimes, now the leader of a sprawling community called the Grimes Family Farm. He and Sophia (who tragically died in season 2 of the show) are married. And that’s just one of the ways the show has made it impossible to go with the ending from the comics.
Even former The Walking Dead showrunner and current chief content officer Scott M. Gimple is under no illusions that the show will even come close to the ending of the comic. However, he does believe that, while different, the series finale will at least nod towards the source material. “It’s like a remix,” he told Entertainment Weekly. “Some things simply have to remix, which I think is awesome, because I loved the end of the comic, but we get to see another version of it, because we have to.”
"It still takes Robert Kirkman’s really cool story and tells his story, but in a very different way and with a different ending. It’s like the same, but different."
If you ask me, I think Judith should be the one to end the show in the same way Carl did in the comics. She’s already been doing emotional monologues at the beginning of each of the final episodes. She’s been around since the prison days, so we’ve seen her grow up over the years. It’s the obvious move, right?
“The throttle is open” in the final episodes of The Walking Dead
Don’t expect things to begin winding down in these final episodes. The stakes are high and the show is as intense as ever. “Up until the finale, it is just full intensity. The throttle is open,” Gimple teased.
One huge difference between the endings of the show and the comics is that the show has to set up spinoffs. The comic conclusion is fairly final; Kirkman has only revisited the series once for a one-shot comic called Negan Lives. Whereas AMC is developing a huge slate of spinoff shows: a Rick Grimes and Michonne show, a Daryl Dixon show, and Dead City. You might think that The Walking Dead will use its final moments to hype the upcoming spinoffs, but that is not the case. “It ends with a really definitive conclusion for both the series and then each individual character,” Gimple said.
The suspense of the final episodes has definitely been compromised by fans knowing that many of the characters will survive to star in spinoffs. Even star Jeffrey Dean Morgan (Negan) has questioned the decision: “That’s not the way we should have gone about it,” he told Entertainment Weekly.
The Walking Dead continues Sundays on AMC; new episodes air one week early for AMC+ subscribers. Catch the long-awaited series finale on November 20!
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