While AMC’s The Walking Dead has never been afraid to kill a fan favorite character on the show, certain core members of the cast seemed to run around with some pretty thick plot armor protecting them. Rick, Michonne, and Daryl rarely feel like they’re in any legit danger, because would The Walking Dead really kill off such central and popular people on the show?
Well, it turns out they would and they did. The latest mid-season finale ends with Carl (played by Chandler Riggs) revealing to his dad Rick that he’s been bitten by a walker. There’s no surviving that, and all of a sudden it feels like anyone is fair game on The Walking Dead once more.
Andrew Lincoln, who plays Rick, spoke with Entertainment Weekly about his show son’s impending death and the main emotion he shared past sadness that he’s losing a co-worker was the shock that The Walking Dead killed Carl.
“I never saw it coming because I always thought that the kid would be the future,” Lincoln said. “And that was the whole point of this — that I was going to hand over the revolver and let him walk off into the distance, you know? So it was incredibly shocking. Everybody was reeling from it and continue to reel from it.”
“Glenn was so radical, but this — with the repercussions of it and what it means to lose a boy — to lose this significant character from the comic books is an extraordinary call. They made the call. They could’ve played safe and had the hero live and take on the show. They didn’t do it. They shouldn’t. He’s the new hero, he’s the hope and the humanity, and everything left in this guy — and yet they took him down. The torch is the kid. They can’t pass the torch on to the kid. That’s the standard way to do it and they’ve not done it. I mean it’s incredibly courageous and I have to commend AMC and Scott, and the writers for making the most daring call they could possibly have made.”
Well, let’s be honest: the most daring call they could have made would have been to kill Rick. And who knows: maybe that’s still coming in the second half of season 8. Lincoln himself has been teasing the idea of his character dying someday because “everybody deserves an end game.” And without Carl to get out of bed in the morning for, Rick does seem to be running short on reasons to keep fighting the good fight.
(Via Entertainment Weekly)
