Ever since the pandemic delayed the Season 10 finale of The Walking Dead and the air date of The Walking Dead: World Beyond spinoff, fans have been wondering when to expect the conclusion to the most recent season and the newest Walking Dead series.
At The Walking Dead’s Comic-Con@Home panel today (which was featured in IGN’s Comic-Con 2020 livestream – watch below), it was revealed that the Season 10 finale, “A Certain Doom,” and the premiere of World Beyond would air on Sunday, October 4. This will officially kick off World Beyond’s uninterrupted first season, which will consist of 10 episodes overall.
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However, this won’t exactly mark the end of The Walking Dead’s Season 10, which has been extended by six episodes, which will air in early 2021. This will provide Walking Dead content for midseason while also making room for The Walking Dead’s Season 11 to premiere later in the year.
We spoke to Chief Content Officer of The Walking Dead Universe Scott Gimple about the decision to add more episodes to Season 10 (as opposed to just starting Season 11) and also about how coronavirus delays have affected both World Beyond’s rollout and the Rick Grimes movies which are still on the horizon.
Extra Walking Dead Episodes Will ‘Bridge’ Season 10 and Season 11
The reason the six extra 2021 episodes are being labeled as part of Season 10 (creating the longest Walking Dead season ever) is because, from a creative point of view, “there’s a prequel quality to the stories,” Gimple told us.
“They’re super cool and they’re very focused episodes,” he explained. “It’s sort of this gathering storm of circumstances that made it feel ‘before’ Season 11.”
Instead of drawing from Season 11 material, The Walking Dead team decided to do something wholly different with the six new episodes. “We’ve been doing some work and there’s been some rearrangement of that work,” he continued, “but it seemed like sort of a cool way to rocket into some of these stories, to maintain the way we wanted to tell some of these other stories, and to deal with the aftermath of Season 10. It’s more connected to Season 10. And Season 11 is just like throwing the throttle open on new stories. These six, in some ways, we’ve called them ‘bridge’ episodes. They bridge the two seasons. It’s leaving all the threads of Season 10 and moving into Season 11.”
Of course, Gimple wanted to make sure that these six didn’t step on the toes of the actual Season 10 finale, since “A Certain Doom” was crafted to mark the end of a larger story. “The finale is the finale,” he said. “These are a prequel to 11.”
How The Walking Dead: World Beyond Connects to the Rick Grimes Movies
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We know that The Walking Dead: World Beyond centers on the larger, militarized group known as the CRM that took Rick away in a helicopter back in The Walking Dead’s ninth season: the group that uses the Three Rings logo (and which also made an appearance in a Season 5 episode of Fear the Walking Dead). But how connected is World Beyond to the first Rick Grimes movie? Is it meant to air before the movies, acting as a direct lead-in? Gimple says it’s not meant to and that, because of coronavirus uncertainty, World Beyond and the Rick movie “can exist on their own schedules.”
“There’s a lot of flexibility there because the stories aren’t intimately involved,” he shared. “There are aspects and histories that they share but really they’re pretty independent of one another.”
Gimple also stated that World Beyond is “a peek into the mythology that some of the movie revolves around. There are aspects of World Beyond that exist in the same universe as the movie. It’s just closer to what Rick’s story is. You know, Rick Grimes doesn’t walk out from around the corner in [World Beyond] and show up, but you learn a lot more about the world that Rick is potentially dealing with. It has deep connections to the movie.”
Given that World Beyond is only two seasons, and isn’t meant to branch out further than that, and that it’s more closely connected to The Walking Dead than Fear the Walking Dead now, was there a temptation for crossovers or more direct connections between the two shows? Gimple said it was actually the opposite. “We want these to be very different from one another,” he explained.
“We have audiences that have been watching for more than ten years, and after ten years we want to give them something new. Something that feels different. There wasn’t that temptation to tie it into The Walking Dead. The two seasons of World Beyond, it’s just telling a different story with a different format. In some ways, it’s very concentrated. The Walking Dead is always portrayed as the zombie show that doesn’t end. Though we’ve seen with the comics, it does.”
While the plan is still for there to be three Rick Grimes movies, a trilogy, with the coronavirus affecting production everywhere Gimple admitted that “anything could change. It’s hard for me to talk with certainty about gravity right now.”
Does The Commonwealth Tie Into the Three Rings?
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The next huge storyline that Walking Dead fans are looking forward to, especially fans of the comic, is The Commonwealth, which will also presumably usher in the return of Lauren Cohan’s Maggie. Gimple, however, wanted to make sure that viewers didn’t think The Commonwealth, which is a massive community in its own right, was part of World Beyond’s Three Rings/CRM group. “I’m gonna say that’s separate,” he said. “Because people are going to find that out really quick.”
As for the postponed finale itself, “A Certain Doom,” Gimple praised showrunner Angela Kang’s work on it, adding that he can’t wait for everyone to finally see it.
“It’s incredibly satisfying,” he said. “It’s badass and emotional. There’s a marrying of scope-y, crazy things that happen but it’s also super emotional. Angela put together something that is totally exciting and badass that you can feel in a Michael Bay kind of way but you can also feel it in on a very emotional level.”
Could the Final Walking Dead Comic Fuel More TV Stories?
A year ago, Robert Kirkman’s Walking Dead comic ended its run with issue #193, titled “The Farmhouse,” and within that final story Gimple found a ton of things he’d love to mine for the TV series, “whether it’s filling in the stuff in between [because of the time jump] or playing out some of the stuff we saw.”
For Gimple, the final issue had “so much possibility for story that I, as fan of the comic, want to see come to life.”
“Hershel [Maggie’s son] has become an incredibly fascinating character. To see his life and to see how the other characters in their future versions… you know, in one way it was an ending to the comics but in another it was a beginning he was handing to us. A great story, well-told, but with the opportunity to tell some more. That’s what Robert gave us.”
Over the years, Robert Kirkman inadvertently spoiled Gimple on upcoming events in the comics during meetings, though with the final comic, Kirkman held back a little. “Kirkman told me so much about [the issue] but he didn’t tell me it was the ending. And I so appreciate that. And I’ve been reading since the beginning so it’s been a heavy thing. Like, he spoiled Glenn’s death and a lot of other things while in the writers’ room and even in that final comic the thing he wrote about me was ‘Sorry for all the spoilers.’ So for him to not spoil that was an incredible gift. Even though he very artfully told a lot of the stuff that was happening in it so he could loop me in, he did not spoil it.”
Fear the Walking Dead’s Possible Time Bending
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For a very brief moment, The Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead’s timelines synced up – just long enough for Morgan to cross over. Then The Walking Dead jumped ahead six years, putting Fear the Walking Dead back in the past again. In fact, now it’s the only one out of four properties (if you also count World Beyond and the Rick movie) to take place long ago. Because of this, Gimple said the Fear team’s been toying around with the possibility of tinkering with time.
“It just allows us, in the next couple years, if we are so lucky to have more seasons, to play with time a little more,” he said. “To potentially have jumps ourselves. We’re in this very new storytelling format on that show that’s very focused on the characters — on single characters per episode or a couple characters per episode — and as we jump around between them we’ve been talking about playing around with time more and more, because we have this big piece of real estate between Fear the Walking Dead and the other shows. It’s this cool element. There’s also potentially some past stuff, things that would be in the past for the other shows. And there are a couple instances where you might be able to see characters in the future – the future being The Walking Dead timeline. It all just gives us more possibilities and different ways to tell stories.”
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Matt Fowler is a writer for IGN and a member of the Television Critics Association. Follow him on Twitter at @TheMattFowler and Facebook at Facebook.com/MattBFowler.
Source: IGN.com Walking Dead Boss Says World Beyond Spinoff Has ‘Deep Connections' to Rick Grimes Movie