The cliffhanger of The Walking Dead's Season 6 finale has had fans everywhere speculating about who got the face full of baseball bat ever since the finale aired back in April. Negan wasn't too particular himself about who he killed to make an example for Rick and Co., so it's been hard to lay odds on which character has bitten the dust. The Season 7 premiere isn't until October, but executive producer Greg Nicotero may have just dropped a major spoiler about what's happening next. Here's what he had to say about what the big cliffhanger meant for fans:
If we would have shown the deaths, then they wouldn't have felt our characters in Season 7 the way they need to.
Dun dun dun! At first glance, it doesn't look like Greg Nicotero did much more than drop yet another tease about Season 7 to get us excited about the premiere in October. We've had no shortage of Walking Dead folks touting the cliffhanger and why it was exactly what we needed at the end of Season 6; Nicotero would have been one of many.
Upon a closer look, however, we can see that Greg Nicotero may have slipped up when he mentioned "deaths" plural. Plenty of us have been assuming that we'll only see one big death in the Season 7 premiere. Most of the candidates are major enough that their demise would suffice to show that the Saviors are not to be messed with. If Nicotero's mention of "deaths" is a clue of what we should expect when Season 7 premieres, we may be in for way more heartache than we anticipated.
It would be a pretty epic twist if The Walking Dead kills off more than one of the good guys when the seventh season kicks off, and it could take the show in a direction that even comic fans might not have been able to predict. After all the build up throughout Season 6, few of us probably thought that Rick and Co. would escape their first encounter with Negan scot-free. Somebody was always likely to die; somebodies dying could change the game in a huge way.
If there's more than one death early in Season 7, I'd put my money on Maggie and her unborn child or Maggie and Glenn. I could definitely see Maggie or Glenn reacting to the other being beaten to death by trying to go after Negan, and that would be no contest. Besides, Maggie already looked like she was on death's door thanks to her ill-advised zombie apocalypse pregnancy.
Of course, Greg Nicotero's mention of "deaths" in his chat with EW could be no more than a transcription error in the interview or an innocent turn of phrase that happened to be plural. We'll have to wait until the Season 7 premiere to see for sure if more than one of the good guys is whacked off to the great zombie apocalypse sanctuary in the sky.
The Walking Dead returns to AMC on Sunday, October 23 at 9 p.m. ET. Check out our breakdown of what we know so far about Season 7, and don't forget to take a look at our fall TV premiere schedule.
