The Walking Dead has been on for nine, soon-to-be 10 seasons, but keeping track of how much time has passed on the show is difficult. That’s true for most shows, except 24, but it’s a particularly challenging task on the AMC zombie series, where knowing how long it’s been since, say, Rick Grimes exited actually matters. The first eight seasons took place in a short amount of time, relatively speaking, but then there was the six-year time jump that brought the characters into the future… and the snow. How do we know it was six years? Because showrunner Angela Kang said as much.
“We’re saying that it’s a six-year time jump,” she explained. “[Judith’s] about four, four-and-a-half when we start the season and then we jump to her being 10 years old, much like Carl was in the comic book and when he started on the show.” As for the short timeline between Rick waking up and when he enters the helicopter, we know it was roughly three-and-a-half years, thanks to a graphic put together by a Walking Dead fan.
(You can see the whole thing here.)
The outbreak is day one, followed by the pilot episode on day 59. Other major events are mapped out, too, including the discovery of the prison (day 300), Glenn and Abraham’s death via Negan’s bat (day 598), and the end of the All-Out War (day 628). As the uploader wrote on Reddit, “I made this to bring more clarity to the timeline of The Walking Dead, for me, and you.” Thank you for service. Now do Game of Thrones.
