The second half of The Walking Dead Season 5 is going to be bringing us a lot of new faces, which is good considering the amount of characters they’ve managed to kill off in the previous episodes. While we really don’t have much of an idea regarding what to expect from the second half of the season when it hits the schedule in February, we have just gotten word that the show has officially added on a new cast member: Ross Marquand.
You might recognize Marquand from his run as Paul Newman on Mad Men, and you might know his voice from portraying Han Solo on Phineas and Ferb. So Marquand is at least reasonably experienced (and apparently pretty great at impressions), but who will he be portraying when the show returns in February? In short, we don’t know for sure, but we do have an idea.
There's a pretty solid theory running around the internet today--though unconfirmed--based on the comic book. If you don’t want to hear any comic spoilers or any possibility of a spoiler for the show, stop reading now!
EW reported the theory, which centers around the comic book character Aaron, who first appears in issue #67. The group first runs into Aaron as they are traveling to Washington D.C., and are convinced to join Aaron’s secure community called Alexandria Safe-Zone. Even more, on an episode of AMC's Talking Dead, Robert Kirkman said that the second half of Season 5 would bring the appearance of a very prominent gay character from the comics. It stands to reason that he was talking about Aaron, but showrunner Scott Gimple is currently keeping his lips zipped.
It does seem to make sense to bring Aaron onto the show. After the events that transpired in the first half of Season 5, the group is pretty directionless, and very broken. While I’m really not too keen on the idea of Rick and the group joining another community (after all, Terminus and Woodbury turned out to be super awesome places), this will give the group a new sense of purpose. In all of the promos for the second half of the season, we don’t have a lot of hints as to where the group plans to go after Dawn’s hospital. We know from a recently released teaser trailer that the group’s main focus is going to be sticking together. Maybe this would be a perfect time for the group to cross paths with someone who can take them to a safely guarded community--even if literally every other community they’ve come across has been a giant spider nest full of nightmares and cannibals.
If Ross Marquand is set to play Aaron, I’ll be quite interested to see how--if at all--Aaron interacts with Morgan. With Morgan discovering Rick’s map to DC, it stands to reason that he’ll come across the group, and maybe Aaron, if that is indeed who Marquand will be portraying. I’ll also be curious to learn that, if Aaron is indeed from Alexandria Safe-Zone, could they be the ones leaving the x-markings on the tree that Morgan is following?
We will have to wait to see what happens when The Walking Dead returns to AMC on February 8 at 9 p.m. ET.
