‘The Walking Dead’ Showrunner Talks the New Big Bad, and What’s Next When the Show Returns

As of tonight’s episode of The Walking Dead, that’s one third of the final season in the books. Spoilers past this point, but as of “For Blood” the leader of the villainous Reapers is dead, replaced by Daryl’s (Norman Reedus) former flame, Leah (Lynn Collins).

“Here’s this person we saw in one context, but we always knew that she would have a turn when we were plotting it out,” The Walking Dead showrunner Angela Kang told Decider.

In the episode, Daryl has been walking a dicey path with The Reapers, but ultimately — of course — sides with Maggie (Lauren Cohan), Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) and the rest. Still, he appeals to Leah’s better nature, and she works with him to take down the Reapers’ leader… Though only gives him a little bit of a head start before she unleashes hell herself.

Meanwhile, back in Alexandria the remaining residents are dealing with a torrential storm. And though we don’t get to see them this episode, things are beginning to heat up at The Commonwealth, as well. To find out more, we talked to Kang about the big pieces of the first third of the season, why Leah made the choice she did, and also nixed a fan theory about Maggie and Negan hooking up.

Decider: Now that these episodes are in the rearview mirror, what was the overall goal here? What pieces needed to be moved around on the chess board, so to speak?

Angela Kang: We really we wanted to tell a story that got back to basics of survival, in the aftermath of what was a war for our people. So, we definitely wanted to tell this story about Maggie’s past, what she faced. Which intersected with Daryl’s past. And so, that Reaper story became really important for us as Maggie was having to face being with her mortal enemy Negan while Daryl was in an uncharacteristic undercover story, while trying to feel out this person from his past.  So, there’s sort of like a hauntedness to that storyline.

We were also trying to show our home team back at Alexandria the challenges of rebuilding after things have been decimated, and that circumstance, human intervention and even just weather are pressing and pressing and pressing on our people.

And then crucially, going forward, it was this Commonwealth storyline, seeing how our group is figuring out what this place is, how can they work the levers there, who are these people? Which is just gonna roll as we get to know more about this community. So those are the three main pieces that we wanted to make sure that we had moving at all times.

You set up Pope as this very iconic TWD style villain in the first eight episodes. You teased him back in season 10, but then ultimately dispatched him here, and seemingly set up Leah as potentially the new “big bad”. What was the goal with that, and should we be looking at Leah as the villain for the next eight episodes?

We found the idea interesting of setting up somebody who would feel definitely like, “well this is the big bad now, this is the guy.” We usually play out those stories over a certain number of episodes and we felt like it would be interesting to take that guy off the board faster than people maybe expect. Occasionally we’ve done that pattern, like the Terminus villains, that story was kind of tight. And so we thought that that would be interesting to see a version of the story where somebody has gotten so out of control that even his own group in some ways is aligned with our people, but just only on that one thing. Definitely for Leah, this is like a villain’s origin story, I suppose? That’s not to say anything about what happens after this [laughs] but our intention with Leah from the time we introduced her, which sort of changed as a result of the pandemic interrupting what our story flow was… We wound up pulling an intro into what was a season 10 extension, but it was originally incorporated into season 11. Here’s this person we saw in one context, but we always knew that she would have a turn when we were plotting it out.

I was struck by how relatively tight the Alexandria group was in this episode as they weather the storm. And it definitely made me wonder, how many people are left in this society at this point, and particularly given how destructive the storm is, is there anything left to salvage?

Um, it’s pretty bad. This storm, it’s pretty devastating, because if you look at even just what a hurricane does to cities right now, not in an apocalypse, it causes problems with mold, it causes problems with their outside security, it messes up any bit of storage, and crops, and things that they were trying to get going. So, they’re definitely in a bad situation. In terms of how many people there are, there’s actually more than we ever show. In our show tracking there’s probably somewhere in the realm of… Maybe even close to like 100 people, or 80 people, or something like that? But this where you really see the secret COVID protocols that are running through the entire season. We can never really have the number of extras we normally would to do a sequence like this. Normally, we would see people packed into the house, all huddling together. There would be tons of extras running around trying to keep up with everything. But we had to keep it pretty tight.

I did want to ask about Judith’s child army that she’s building, which in my mind seems to be one of the crucial clues to the end game of the show, at least how I see it. Because we know from the comics, there’s a jump forward in time we see how things end up. Is that something you’re heading towards at all? Or is this more just about Judith’s journey, Gracie’s journey, etc.?

Without getting into anything that’s spoiler territory, for the kids I do think that Judith feels like: we’ve all got to be equally ready. Because things are falling apart, and she’s trained because of the particular parents she had. At this point all the children have some sort of survival training that maybe kids now wouldn’t have? But she’s definitely the best with weapons, she’s got the most training and experience. And so she doesn’t want her friends to ever be caught in a situation where they don’t know how to defend themselves because, what we’ve seen in this entire block is: things are getting more and more dangerous. She, in her own way, has to act as a leader and go “nobody’s training the kids, so I’m gonna  do it.” That says a lot about her and about how much she cares about the other kids. They’re certainly gonna grow up as the first generation who’s always lived in the apocalypse.They are gonna wind up with a completely different set of skills, because they had to start so early.

We don’t really get to see the Commonwealth storyline in this episode, but it’s been interesting to see how much of it is almost straight adaptation, with obviously some differences, like the show always does. What was particularly exciting for you about this storyline, and how much will it potentially be straight adaptation going forward; versus by necessity veering off?

By necessity it is going to veer off, because we have such a different cast of characters than existed in the comic at this stretch. What I found really interesting about this story is that it deals with questions like, “if society has fallen, what are you trying to build back?” Once you actually have the numbers to do something that’s actually really impressive and incredibly safe and all that, what are the assumptions that you rebuild upon? And so, that’s different than the Whisperer storyline where Alpha was like, “I question the need for civilization at all. I find that a fundamentally flawed concept,” and so they’ve moved from that to really the binary opposite: here’s a group of people who completely believe in civilization. And, in fact, think that they want to try to rebuild what existed, but nothing’s ever going to be exactly the same… You wind up looking at this “bizzaro” mirror that highlights: were these problems always the same problems? Have they gotten worse because of the apocalypse? How do we navigate this and how does that intersect with our ability to survive as people who have dealt with tough people, that have to deal with zombies, and everything else. That was something that I found interesting about that story, but of course we’ll still have our people going out on adventures on the road, too. I mean, that’s always part of the vibe in that story.

I know I have to let you go but real quick: Negan and Maggie aren’t gonna hook up, right?

No.

Okay, good. I saw some people speculating about this online and it just raised my alarm bells, but thank you for confirming that, I appreciate it.

No, that one I’m okay just answering. Like, it’s interesting… Fans have those things and, I do think there’s such strong emotion on both sides and there is tension, and they are both trying to figure the other person out. So there’s a lot of those things that can cross with certain archetypes of a romantic story? We even talked in the room like, oh, signals are gonna get crossed sometimes for fans. We still wanted to stay true to: there is anger and violence and can I trust you? Who are you? Do I like you, do I not like you? It’s in a platonic way, 100%

I think we’ve all consumed too much vampire fiction, is what’s going on.

[laughs] Maggie is… She’s true Glenn, all the way.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

The Walking Dead returns to AMC on Sunday, February 20, 2022 at 9/8c.

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