We cannot wait for season 7! The Walking Dead showrunners Scott M. Gimple and Robert Kirkman spoke out on Sunday following another cliffhanger during the season 6 finale of the AMC series, which aired on Sunday, April 3 — and they confirmed the fate of one main character.
“The end of the story, is what people saw,” Gimple said on the live talk show Talking Dead after the finale aired. “When we reveal who was on the receiving end there, that’s going to be the start of another story. The kickback effects from that — what it makes everyone into, how they react, how the world changes for everyone — that’s the next part of the story.”
The 90-minute episode ended with the appearance, at last, of villain Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), whose spiked bat, a.k.a. Lucille, bludgeoned to death one particular victim, though that person’s identity remains unknown. The 11 remaining survivors who were captured by the saviors at the end of the season included Daryl (Norman Reedus), Michonne (Danai Gurira), Glenn (Steven Yeun), his pregnant wife Maggie (Lauren Cohan), leader Rick (Andrew Lincoln), Sasha (Sonequa Martin-Green), Aaron (Ross Marquand), Rosita (Christian Serratos), Eugene (Josh McDermitt), Abraham (Michael Cudlitz) and Rick’s son Carl (Chandler Riggs).
After the episode aired, Gimple was also joined by Dead’s comic-book creator, Robert Kirkman, who also serves as executive producer on the series. Kirkman confirmed to listeners that Negan did, in fact, kill one of the 11 remaining characters.
“I’m feeling oddly great,” Kirkman said of Negan’s big debut on the series. “I’m excited about where it’s at. What’s happening in the show is extremely sad and extremely distressing, but I think it’s going to put us into a good place for season 7. I’m excited because I get excited about these things. I’m a bit of a lunatic that way.”
Neither Kirkman nor Gimple revealed the identity of the victim on Sunday, but the showrunners confirmed that it will be a tough one to stomach for fans. “[He or she] is beloved to everyone,” Kirkman confirmed. “If you read the comic-book series, pretty much every issue ends with a cliffhanger — and sometimes the trades [of the collected issues], so it’s like a six-month break if you’re just reading that to find out what happens next, and I think that’s a lot of fun.”
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