The Walking Dead season 8 midseason trailer is giving viewers the final chance to say their goodbyes to Carl Grimes. The video posted on Friday, February 2, starts and ends with the wise words of Carl, as he clings to his life and says goodbye to his father Rick Grimes.
“You put away your gun. Hell, you stopped fighting. It was right. It still is. You can still be like that again,” a dying Carl tells Rick. “I can’t be who I was. It’s different now,” Rick answers.
Carl was bitten by a walker on the December 10 midseason finale and the premiere will most likely be the last we see of actor Chandler Riggs. The actor’s father blasted AMC for killing him off following the midseason finale. “Watching [Scott] Gimple fire my son two weeks before his 18th birthday after telling him they wanted him for the next three years was disappointing,” William Riggs wrote on Facebook after the episode aired. “I never trusted Gimple or AMC but Chandler did. I know how much it hurt him. But we do absolutely know how lucky we have been to be a part of it all and appreciate all the love from fans all these years!”
Granted, fans will see some happiness during the second half of the season.
There is one especially happy moment during the new video: the entire crew is back together at the Hilltop. Tara, Rosita and Daryl, carrying Judith, walk through the gates, reuniting with Morgan, Carol and Maggie.
However, Dwight isn’t sure it’s the greatest idea. “Are you sure going to Hilltop’s the best plan? All of you in one place, together?” he asks Daryl, who responds: “All of us together would be their worst damn nightmare.”
The trailer ends again with Carl, referencing his mother, Lori, who was killed in season 4. “Before Mom died, she told me that I was gonna beat this world. You will,” he says to his father.
“I’m not going to lie to you, that was sad,” Andrew Lincoln told Entertainment Weekly about having to say goodbye to both Carl and Riggs. “The beautiful thing is it’s what we rarely do in our show — we actually give the opportunity for a goodbye. It was unusual in that regard. Usually, things happen and people are ripped from you in this world that we inhabit. Thankfully, there was some sense of catharsis on this one, because we got to leave it all out on the screen. I thought Chandler did a remarkable job, as he always has done, but particularly in this episode.”
The midseason of The Walking Dead airs on AMC Sunday, February 26, at 9 p.m. ET.
