TWD Universe chief content officer, Scott Gimple, says The Walking Dead final season gets “really brutal” and “very, very dark.” The hit zombie show on AMC has been going for eleven years and the series will return to its larger scale and scope with its final season. Season 10 had our favorite zombie apocalypse survivors go to war against Alpha (Samantha Morton), Beta (Ryan Hurst), and the rest of the zombie skin-wearing Whisperers. The war finally ended with the heroic efforts of Daryl (Norman Reedus) and Carol (Melissa McBride).
The Walking Dead Final Season Will Be 24 Episodes of Survival
When all conflict seemed to cease momentarily, one of the Walking Dead’s season 10 bonus episodes introduced us to the Reapers who were hunting down Maggie Rhee (Lauren Cohan) and her tiny group of group of survivors. Now in the aftermath of the Whisperer War, our heroes in Alexandria must continue to fight the dead and fear the living in the 24 episodes of The Walking Dead’s final season. Maggie also must learn to co-exist with her husband’s killer, Negan, inside the walls of Alexandria.
“Not totally [dark and gloomy]. There’s some sunshine between the gloom, but the dark stuff gets very, very, very, very dark,” Gimple told TWDUniverse on Twitch about Season 11. “But it’s not unrelentingly dark. There’s some bright spots.”
The Walking Dead producers already gave TWD fans a taste of the Reapers returning when Daryl and Maggie were nearly killed by a camouflage attacker known as “Pope”. Then there’s Father Gabriel (Seth Gilliam) who showed us his dark side when he killed Mays in cold blood. Guest star Robert Patrick from Terminator 2 played Mays.
“Without getting too into it, there’s a level of intensity to these episodes that’s both an intensity of threat intermingled with the intensity of emotions behind that, and various histories of the characters getting intermingled with that,” Gimple said. “There’s some really brutal stuff in it, and yet it directly affects some of our most beloved characters and ties into their histories in ways that we’ll see.”
Will the survivors be forced to move on from Alexandria now that it has grown larger with the addition of Maggie’s group and her son Hershel Rhee (Kien Michael Spiller)? The Walking Dead final season will be broken up into three 8-episode groups with the last part ending sometime in 2022. A 2-part premiere written by showrunner Angela Kang will jumpstart the larger scale eleventh and final season on Sunday, August 22, on AMC.