The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman is used to dealing with trolls — he said he’s “lived with death threats for 15 years” — but the hate became amplified after the AMC show’s cliffhanger season six finale, which ended before viewers saw who Negan smashed to death with a baseball bat. Kirkman explained “we weren’t trying to game the audience, we weren’t trying to drive you crazy, and we certainly weren’t trying to FORCE you to come back for season seven,” and that he and showrunner Scott M. Gimple “spent many months going over exactly how to stage it and how to adapt that scene.” In the end, after all the threats and vitriol and secrecy, one of Negan’s victims was Glenn… who was killed in a similar fashion in the comics.
There was never any serious consideration of having Glenn make it out of Negan’s “eeny meeny miny mo” circle alive, Kirkman told Entertainment Weekly. “It’s just that there’s a lot of material that comes from Glenn’s death in the comics,” he said. “And while we do try to change things up to keep things interesting for the audience, and for me, this is one that there’s so much that comes from Rick, there’s so much with Negan, because that character is someone that he killed, and definitely Maggie is someone that kind of gets put on the trajectory that affects a great number of stories and a great number of characters moving forward. So it was kind of essential that that part of the scene at least remained intact, unfortunately.”
It was especially difficult to write Glenn off the show because “Glenn was actually the first death in the comic that happened after the person was cast,” Kirkman explained. “Abraham died in the comic book before Cudlitz had ever been cast as Abraham. There are a lot of other big deaths that happened, but they were all done in the comic before the person was cast, so Glenn was actually the first time while I was writing the comic where I was like, oh geez.”
Cheer up, Kirkman: “I will find you” are better final words than “oh geez.”
(Via Entertainment Weekly)
