Hot damn! It’s been just over a month since we bid a fond and gut-coated farewell to the survivors of The Walking Dead, and AMC is already allowing us to briefly welcome them back into our lives through the first trailer for the Season 6 midseason premiere. And it’s got one moment that comic fans are going to go crazy for. Check it out, and beware of major spoilers beneath the video.
If that wasn’t enough to get you pumped – while also thinking that this group probably stinks worse than someone shitting out sulfur – then I’m not sure how to fix that. Granted, there wasn’t a lot of new footage here, though that’s understandable since AMC still has a month and a half of promotion to go, but that last moment absolutely made me giddy.
In an extremely quick piece of footage, we get to see Rick swinging down a hatchet, which he unfortunately rarely does in live-action. And here’s where the speculation begins, as we’re wondering who it will be on the other end of that swing. As we saw when the midseason finale ended, Jessie’s son Sam started whining just as the viscera-covered Alexandrians were trying to make their way through the zombie herd, and that will undoubtedly cause the surrounding walkers to attack, putting everyone in danger. If things follow how Robert Kirkman originally wrote it, someone will get ambushed by the walkers and will grab Carl in a fit of desperation.
And then down comes the hatchet, as Rick won’t let anything happen to his son. On the page, it was Jessie who suffered this arm-chopped fate, with Rick obviously choosing family over a temporary romance. (I mean, she was as good as dead then anyway.)
It’s entirely possible that this will be one of those times where Scott Gimple and Kirkman take a left turn from the source material, putting another character at the end of Rick’s hatchet. One likely candidate would be Ron, who would probably grab Carl in a fit of pitiful rage, and Rick would have zero problems with putting Ron down. Assuming Sam gets mauled first, that would mean Jessie would have lost both her kids and her husband in a short amount of time, which would be rather tragic. Maybe it should be Jessie to fall victim, though that would just make Ron a bigger douche in the aftermath. Can we just get all of this family killed off?
As well, this scene will hopefully give us that iconic Carl moment from the comics, but we’ll save our thoughts on that for a later trailer. Beyond all that, though, it looks like we’ll get to see some more of Negan’s crew The Saviors, first officially introduced in the second half of Season 6's prologue scene that aired during the post-finale Into the Badlands. And while there was no sign of Dwight, we’ll almost certainly catch up with him again at some point, too.
Find out who will be losing which appendage when The Walking Dead returns to AMC on Sunday, February 14. Now join me in celebrating that the next episode will be picking up right where the previous one left off, instead of flipping over to some other part of the storyline, as the first half of Season 6 did.
