Spoilers ahead for The Walking Dead! You’ve been warned!
The Walking Dead has finally returned from hiatus and they’re not messing around. Last week’s midseason premiere “No Way Out” saw some of the most gruesome violence and brutal turns of events we’ve on the show in quite a while. After seeing Jessie and Sam ripped apart by walkers, Carl was shot with a bullet intended for Rick by Mr. Angsty himself, Ron. While Michonne quickly took action and took Ron out of the picture, Carl was severely injured and apparently lost an eye in the process. After all of that chaos happening, the new question is: now what?
Apparently the team behind The Walking Dead felt the same way, and have a device to help move the story along organically. That device: a time jump. Walking Dead showrunner Scott Gimple recently opened up regarding the logic around this decision:
Episode 10 happens some time after episode nine — there's not a giant time jump — not like the huge one in the book. But weeks have passed and we'll see some changes in Alexandria. Jessie's death was horrific and it was the worst possible outcome in that case but we aren't going to be portraying Rick's grieving process or the cleanup of Alexandria — that would be two episodes.
Honestly this makes total sense. Scott Gimple’s comment, which comes to us from THR, is a bit of a bomb dropping moment. A time jump isn’t just happening, it’s happening this Sunday.
As a superfan of The Walking Dead, I’m glad that the show is moving things along. Because the series is so character driven, pacing for TWD can sometimes be an issue. We saw this happen during Glenn-gate, where we were forced to wait weeks before we found out Glenn’s fate; instead we got an extra long Morgan flashback episode, and a return to Alexandria.
Since so many crazy moments happened in “No Way Out”, I’m glad we don’t have to sit through a few episodes of everyone unwinding and recapping the chaos. We presumably won’t see Jessie’s family funeral, or everyone sitting around Carl’s bed in the infirmary. Instead, The Walking Dead will move things up a bit, and we’ll see the new version of “normal” that Alexandria is facing. The residents are capable, Rick has hope, and life goes on.
Then again, part of me wants to see more of the Alexandrians the day after. I honestly couldn’t get enough of them all finally stepping up to the plate and kicking some zombie ass. I could have watched pantry lady Olivia with a machete for a full hour.
It should be interesting to see where The Walking Dead goes in Episode 10. The trailers, which are always extremely cryptic and usually misleading, seem to focus on Daryl and Rick. Additionally, Spencer Monroe might be painted in a possible antagonist. While he stepped up and fought off the zombie herd, he was unaware that Deanna was dead. Now that he’s the lone member of the Monroe family, he might become disillusioned and hopeless. We’ll see.
The Walking Dead airs Sundays on AMC.
