Possible spoilers for The Walking Dead Season 6 below. No drones were used, though.
The Walking Dead is just over a month away from shoving fans headfirst into the biggest herd of walkers that the show has delivered yet. But Season 6 still has a lot of surprises left to deliver, and one of them just might involve a major change to a character’s story as compared to how things played out in the comics. That character? The newly widowed Jessie Anderson.
Actress Alexandra Breckenridge, who plays Jessie on the show, was promoted to a regular for Season 6 (along with a couple of others), which means we’ll presumably be getting to know her character a lot better as the season goes on. But wait! As comic book readers are aware, Jessie and her son Sam were not at all long for this world on the page, and I was absolutely ready to accept their last days were coming up not long after Season 6 gets underway. What can I say? That shot from the trailer, on the nose as it was, still made me think that the little family’s fate would be sealed soon after, once certain characters tried the old “rub zombie guts all over yourself and just walk through them” gag.
I don’t want to go into too much detail on that, since Breckenridge’s promotion may indeed mean this particular plot point will happen to some other character. Though if we’re being honest, this could actually be a ruse by the Walking Dead creative team to throw fans for a loop as far as what happens to Jessie. Perhaps Breckenridge was told ahead of time that her character would be dying soon, and that they would make her a regular for a short time to make it seem like she’d be around a lot longer. Or maybe Jessie will indeed meet her maker in the same was as she did in the comics, only at a different point that will come much later in the TV show, like at the end of Season 6 or even beyond.
Whatever ends up happening to her, Breckenridge’s pumped-up role will undoubtedly include some advancement on the romantic angle that was forming between her and Rick, something she was quick to squash due to the presence of her overbearing and abusive husband Pete. But he’s not around anymore. This angle could feed into Scott Gimple’s earlier assertion that comic book Andrea’s plotlines would show up in other characters, should Rick and Jessie indeed remain a couple for longer than a couple of sack-rolls. And that would also put a bullet in the foot of anyone hoping for Rick and Michonne to become an item, at least for a while.
According to THR, the other two promotions went to Tovah Feldshuh, who plays Alexandria’s leader Deanna, and Austin Nichols, who plays Deanna’s son Spencer. We can’t wait to see what’s in store for those characters when The Walking Dead returns to AMC for Season 6, which premieres on Sunday, October 11.
