The Walking Dead Showrunner Confirms What We Suspected About The Show's Ending
AMC's "The Walking Dead" is shambling toward its' series finale, with the second half of its 11th and last season set to return to the airwaves on February 20. Fans of the show and the comic book from which it sprung are excited to see how the series will bring about an ending to the incursion of the walkers, who have caused untold disasters and chewed through a number of main characters since "The Walking Dead" hit the air back in 2010.
Fans of both the comic and television series versions of "TWD" know one thing for sure: amidst the gore and the angst, they're two entirely different entities whose events diverge pretty quickly from a singular timeline. Characters live in one version of the story and die in another. Different things happen in different places to different people. But there have been exceptions to this rule; some storylines, such as Negan's (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), have been transferred to the show with only a handful of changes between the two formats. Yet it's likely not surprising that a recent interview with the showrunner of "The Walking Dead" has finally confirmed what we've always suspected about the way the show will end.
The show's ending will not resemble that of the comics
This may not surprise devoted "The Walking Dead" fans, but the show's strong divergence from the comic's timeline will carry through to its series finale. Via a SyFy interview with series showrunner Angela Kang, while the series started "with the comic as our basis," the AMC program also uses "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." She added that "we've got different directions that the story has gone so we're definitely in a parallel universe from the comics" but also expressed hope that the finale will honor "elements of theme and intention" from the comic series.
Indeed, fans of the comics will remember that Carl Grimes survived to adulthood in the comics. Per Den of Geek, within the pages of "The Walking Dead"'s comic world, Carl marries Sophia, Carol's daughter, and together, they have a daughter named Andrea. The world is peaceful, and walkers have been a thing of the past for years. But suddenly one stumbles onto Carl's property, and he kills it. Carl then learns that the walker escaped from Hershel Greene's keeping. Greene runs a carnival and the walkers are a part of his sideshow, and after killing it, Carl is charged with the destruction of Greene's property. Carl is then tasked with replacing the walker as a form of penance to the law and to Greene alike.
Sophia, Hershel, and Carl are all dead in the television version of "The Walking Dead," which makes recreating the comic version of the series' ending wholly impossible — unless the show wishes to erase seasons worth of major milestone events. Hey, other dramas have gone there before.