Spoilers below for anyone who hasn't watched Robot Chicken's Walking Dead special yet.
For many fans of The Walking Dead, The Robot Chicken Walking Dead Special: Look Who's Walking got to the Merle-singing heart of what makes the franchise so ridiculous, while never quite being mean or insulting. One of the most ludicrous sequences, the Lucille-as-Superman segment, actually spawned from Robot Chicken creators Matthew Senreich and Seth Green wondering about one of The Walking Dead TV show's more inexplicably eyebrow-raising moments, which came during the episode with Rosita's attempted assassination. When Senreich and Green talked with CinemaBlend about the hilarious special, here's what they told me about that otherworldly scene:
Matthew Senreci: We had to figure out how that bat protected Negan from that bullet.Seth Green: That bat clearly had a purpose, and its purpose was to save the day at that moment.
If it's so easy to consider a humanoid entity being born and shipped over to Earth in order to do that whole world-saving thing, I suppose I'm on board with buying into a sentient baseball bat going through the same scenario, if for a purpose that's more ill-fitting for humanity at large. It was perhaps the most Robot Chicken way of answering how Negan actually survived that gunshot, since the Adult Swim series is pretty familiar with DC superheroes, but I mean, this is the zombie apocalypse, where nothing makes the most amount of logical sense. So if the bat is said to be an alien, I'm not necessarily the biggest skeptic.
Obviously, Lucille is not an alien. (And I'm not trying to tie this into the one-shot issue "The Alien," by Brian K. Vaughan and Marcos Martin.) But it's an interesting idea for how to explain this comic book-originated scenario, right? Lucille (before being attached to the name "Lucille" as far as the comic scenario goes) had parents that didn't want to give her up, which is kind of like how Bruce Wayne didn't want to give up his parents...even though both sets of birth parents died. Okay, but what if Rick's mother's name was Martha?
During the creation of the Walking Dead special, the Robot Chicken writers room was graced with the presence of the comic creator Robert Kirkman and the AMC series' showrunner Scott Gimple. And to be expected, Matthew Senreich and Seth Green hit them up for any answers that did not originate on a different planet.
Matthew Senreich: We poked fun at Scott Gimple the entire time about how I don't understand how a baseball bat can stop a bullet.Seth Green: He argued the science with us, too.Matthew Senreich: So we had to get its origin story. This bat is named. We have to know where it comes from.
Even if there's not some grandiose explanation for why Lucille was able to save Negan from a bullet, the reason why it happened is because Spencer's guts fell out, and I think we can all celebrate that, right?
Look Who's Walking, the Robot Chicken Walking Dead special, aired Sunday night on Adult Swim, and you can bet that it'll find its way online and On Demand post-haste, and in time for you to watch it a bunch of times before The Walking Dead Season 8 premieres on AMC on Sunday, October 22. Check out how important Robert Kirkman was in getting this special made, and to see when other shows are hitting primetime soon, head to our fall TV premiere schedule.
