The Walking Dead boss talks variant zombies

For its final stretch, The Walking Dead introduced a smarter breed of zombies…or rather, it brought them back. And it could just be the beginning.

When The Walking Dead started way back in 2010, protagonist Rick Grimes had to deal with zombies who could open doors and use crude weapons. Years in, everything changed. Rick left the series, for one, and the semi-intelligent zombies he’d met at the beginning were replaced by ambling bands of braindead walkers.

But those smart zombies have come back in the show’s final stretch, menacing our characters by climbing up walls and using the barest bit of lateral thought. There “variant” walkers helped raise the stakes for the finale.

“One of them is the lurkers that we’ve seen,” showrunner Angela Kang told TV Line. “You can even argue that there are certain rules, like with the way Michonne’s pets operate, for example. This is a variant of the walkers that we saw way back — walkers that could climb and pick things up and [so on].”

"We wanted to see what happens when you put [the variations] in a herd. We’re definitely leaving a door open for things for people who also watched World Beyond. There was a little something at the end of that series that hinted that maybe things don’t develop the same in every single place."

World Beyond was a Walking Dead spinoff show that ended with the hint that there could be fast-moving walkers somewhere out there in the world. Surely AMC will explore this with the network of Walking Dead spinoff shows it’s developing, but Kang couldn’t — or wouldn’t — comment on that. “I think that’s all I can say without getting in trouble from the universe,” she laughed. “It’s more of a question for [content chief] Scott Gimple.”

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