Robert Kirkman & Norman Reedus: “The Walking Dead will get much darker for Daryl and Maggie.”

While Beth’s death was a shocker in The Walking Dead mid-season finale for everyone, we didn’t really expect it to have such far-reaching  effects, given how many characters have already died. Nonetheless, the show is about to feel the repercussions of it. Big time.

Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman has been talking about the event: “To a certain extent this might send Daryl on a spiral,” he said.

“Coming out of Beth’s death and how he opened up to that character and really cared for her and then ended up losing her — that might lead to him being a little bit more distant, which is going to lead to some other things that I can’t talk about.”

And what about Maggie, Beth’s sister? Surely she’ll have an emotional ride? “Maggie to a certain extent is adrift,” he said.

“One by one she has slowly lost her family, the Greene family… she’s definitely got a lot to deal with… and for her it’s kind of a two step grieving process because she thought that she had lost Beth when she lost her father. And it was kind of like a one-two punch of, ‘Oh my gosh, I’ve lost this person.’ And it was an uplifting moment and a moment of hope when she was told that Beth was out there and Beth was actually alive, but then she immediately found out the opposite. And so it was really kind of a gut wrenching series of events that she’s had to experience, and that’ll weigh on her tremendously.”

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But what about Glenn? He’s Maggie’s rock, right? “eventually a character named Negan is introduced, and he’s going to bash in Glenn’s brains with a baseball bat called Lucille,” says Kirkman.

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Norman Reedus, Daryl Dixon, hasbeen chatty about the whole grieving process too: “Beth was teaching Daryl a lesson for a while—telling him that not everybody’s bad and there are still good people out there, at a point when he pretty much thought the opposite and he had given up on that whole idea. She was this little beacon of hope and slowly her ideals were seeping into Daryl. I don’t know that it was so much of a love thing—like he was in love with her or felt love feelings for her. There was love there. I don’t know if it was romantic love, but there was the idea of hope and love, and that the world’s not as dark everywhere.

He goes on: “Taking her away from him like that, in front of his face, when he fought so hard to get her back, was crushing to him. He goes into a depression and I think he’ll slowly seep back into a dark place… the way that Daryl shot that cop that accidently shot Beth—it wasn’t like he had to think about it. He just went straight into murder mode. It wasn’t any sort of fight with should he or shouldn’t he?—that was just a no brainer. I think Carol putting her hand on his shoulder was the only thing that stopped him from shooting everybody in front of him.”

What about the group? “Everyone’s incredibly low after this. It’s one of the darkest times that we’ve ever had as a group. Everyone is on the verge or giving up. At some point what’s in the their head is, “What’s the point?” Certain characters have more to live for than others, but everyone is super low at this point. We’re in a dark phase—a dark depressed phase… the back half of this season is completely different than any section of any season. The settings are different, the conflict is different, different relationships. I have changed. People have morphed into different people in the second half. You’ll see characters that were so one way be a different way, be completely different. That comes from that breaking point that we were just speaking about.”

So, no sign of it getting happy-go-lucky in the immediate future, then? Figures…

Sources: Inquisitr and EW

And, just incase that was a little too dark… here’s Jimmy Fallon and Norman Reedus messing around