The Walking Dead is Going to Break Our Hearts

The mid-season premiere of AMC’s The Walking Dead was a gut puncher, and we’re heading for a real heartbreaker in the season finale.

We won’t spoil anything for you if you haven’t yet seen it, but Sunday’s episode opens with one character falling to the zombie horde that has overtaken the Alexandria Safe-Zone, followed immediately by another. A third goes down within sixty seconds, and a fourth is mortally wounded.

The episode leaves us in a stunned state of shock before it’s even half over, and it’s hard not to seriously wonder for the first time if it’s the beginning of the end, if we’re about to see most of the main characters fall.

Those who haven’t experienced The Walking Dead yet have no idea why it’s the most popular show in the history of cable television. Sure, it speaks to our modern anxieties about global pandemics, terrorism and economic collapse, but there’s a lot more to it than that, starting with the fact that it’s not about zombies. Not really. If it was just about zombies, it would be the world’s longest B-movie.

Storytellers of all types take note: the only stories worth telling in this world are about people.

And The Walking Dead is about people. It’s about survival. It’s about the struggle to behave as a civilized person after civilization has been annihilated. The zombies are just there to blow up the world.

The story is necessarily violent and gruesome and terrifying as well as horrifying, but most of all it’s emotionally wrenching. We love these characters—most of them, anyway—and there’s no way they could all survive the end of the world.

Some of the human survivors are as bad as the zombies—or walkers as the characters call them—and we know already that a seriously bad dude named Negan is on his way to wreak yet more destruction on whatever’s left of the Safe-Zone.

He’s going to kill one of our favorite characters. Readers of the graphic novel series know who’s head is going to roll. At least they think they do. According to set rumors, though, the writers may have mixed things up a bit and are going to have Negan kill somebody else. It’s an interesting decision, if true. Those who think they know where the story is heading can enjoy, if that’s the right word, the suspense as much as the rest of us.

We can’t spoil it for you because we don’t actually know. No one leaked the script to us. We haven’t even read the graphic novels.

Whatever ends up happening, it will be devastating.

“I felt sick to my stomach when I read the script,” says star Andrew Lincoln, who plays Rick Grimes, the group’s leader. “It was the first day in the whole six years of working on The Walking Dead that I was late for work because I woke up in the middle of the night and I couldn’t get back to sleep. I was so angry and frustrated and I felt sick. And that was just after reading it.”

“The word ‘finale’ gives me a physical reaction because it’s the hardest day on set that I’ve ever had in my life,” says Lauren Cohan, who plays Maggie. “I never even imagined that as an actor you could have that experience. It’s one of the most raw experiences that I think any of us have ever had. Andy talks about being late to work; I didn’t want to go to work that day. It took a really, really long time for everybody to feel okay again after the finale, let’s put it that way.”

Season 7 is in the works, so somebody is going to survive whatever’s coming, but we may have to fortify ourselves with a box of Kleenex and some anti-depressants before we get there.