Has The Walking Dead gone to the extreme to protect the secret of who Negan has killed?

Ok, so one of TV’ most talked about things over the last couple of months was the finale of The Walking Dead Season 6…

Rick and the gang finally bumped into Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) and just as the credits rolled we heard Negan kill one of the good guys… but we have no idea who it was until around Halloween when Season Seven kicks off.

And, while we reckon it has to be Glen – the victim in the comics – there’s a strong possibility that Negan ended someone completely different.

It’s a damned if you do, damned if you don’t scenario for the makers of the show – if they kill Glen everyone will complain because they knew it was coming, if they don’t, everyone will complain because it strayed from the source material.

Anyway…

In order to keep the secret of who is dead, according to THR:

Season six ended with Carl (Chandler Riggs), Rick (Andrew Lincoln), Michonne (Danai Gurira), Eugene (Josh McDermitt), Maggie (Lauren Cohan), Sasha (Sonequa Martin-Green), Daryl (Norman Reedus), Arron (Ross Marquand), Rosita (Christian Serratos), Abraham (Michael Cudlitz) and Glenn (Steven Yeun) all lined up before the charming villain and his barbed wire-covered bat, Lucille, with Negan taking a deadly swing at one of them.”

So, what’s the scoop? Well: “Each of the eleven cast members involved in the scene have already filmed a death scene. The Walking Dead producers and the episode director will then work with the show’s editors and pick the character who does indeed die.”

Series creatorRobert Kirkman has said that Negan’s victim is “beloved to everyone” and that the next episode will pick up immediately after the last and “you’ll see who was at the end of that bat and what happened from there”. 

In the modern age of spies and spoilers, such extreme measures are becoming a necessity for the sake of surprises, says showrunner Scott M. Gimple let year: “With the advent of drones, it can become such a game of cat and mouse that as far as sneaking a peek at the actors walking to set, we want to just keep our actors safe and the people who might be looking safe — like [when they’re] in the street.

“Sometimes you can tell a specific story point based on what someone’s wearing or what their makeup looks like — so in that case, we do what we can to cover in order to protect the story.”

If this is all true, that’s an admiral length to go for storytelling and we salute them for it.