When The Walking Dead Season 11 part two returns in 2022, Leah (Lynn Collins) will be out for blood. Part One’s midseason finale back in October, “For Blood,” ended with Leah turning on Pope (Ritchie Coster) and pinned the murder on the enemy — specifically Daryl (Norman Reedus). The Walking Dead showrunner, Angela Kang, previously told Deadline about bringing back Daryl’s old flame and turning her into a villain.
“I think for Daryl and Leah, that evolved over time as we were working on the season. We knew that we wanted to kind of do almost like this, I suppose, like a villain’s origin story with Leah,” the Walking Dead showrunner said. “I think with Daryl, it’s really like there is this romantic aspect once, but we always felt that the story was more about what happens in grief when you cling to somebody, but that moment is gone, and you realize, looking in the rear-view mirror, that there was like always something that was broken or toxic about it.”
As Maggie (Lauren Cohan) marches on to Meridian, the first part of the expanded TWD season showed Leah firing some rocket-powered arrows at Daryl’s friends below leaving off with a cliffhanger. The fates of Maggie, Gabriel (Seth Gilliam), Elijah (Okea Eme-Akwari), and Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) is up in the air. We’ll see how it all comes down when The Walking Dead Season 11 returns next February.
“We survived everything for what? To keep fighting and killing each other?” Daryl asks Leah in a standoff to start Part 2 of Season 11. She answers, “If that’s what it takes.”
“In some ways, the Maggie, Negan, Daryl, Leah stories bounce off of each other because Negan is our number one example of a villain who all of our people hated, who has come around to sort of be integral to our group in his own way,” Kang told Deadline. “Leah is somebody that we started off as like maybe she’s not a villain, but can she come back? So, we felt like that was an interesting way to touch on the questions of, is redemption really possible in this world? Are there foregone conclusions?”
“Like if you cut somebody’s story off at just the right place, do you just feel good about that and move on, or should you have given them a couple more turns to get somewhere else?” the Walking Dead showrunner continued. “So, that was just something that thematically we were thinking about a lot as we were building this first block.”
The Walking Dead Season 11 Part 2 returns February 20 on AMC.
