The Walking Dead had another of its patented character wipeouts last night as the penultimate episode of season 9 saw not one or two but ten survivors murdered by Alpha and the Whisperers. Attacking during Ezekiel’s trade fair, the villains displayed their victims’ decapitated heads on pikes to mark their territory and among the dead were Tara, Enid and Henry, something that came as a shock to fans as none of them were involved in the comic book version of the event.
Things weren’t originally intended to play out this way, though. While speaking to EW, showrunner Angela Kang explained that initially the plan was to have the massacre end the season. However, the writers then decided it would be better to explore the aftermath of the event before wrapping things up. With that in mind, Kang teases that the finale will be less of a bang to end on and more of a question mark that addresses what happens next.
“I kind of felt like, ‘I don’t want it to be the final moment, but it’s probably in the finale.’ And that’s the assumption we went on for a long time. But as we worked on it, we found that it’s everybody’s expectation. And one of the big things I wanted to do this season is kind of play with the rhythms of our storytelling a bit here and there so that maybe the things are happening at times that you don’t expect it to happen, so there’s a little bit of an element of surprise for the audience. I also think there’s something interesting about, ‘Here’s this gigantic thing that happened,’ and then, ‘What happens next?’ And seeing a taste of it.”
But don’t think there won’t be any surprises. Kang concluded by teasing that there’s one more “left turn” to come in this week’s last episode of season 9. “I’m gonna take a little bit of a left turn in the finale, too,” she told EW, enigmatically.
Titled “The Storm” – which follows on from yesterday’s “The Calm Before” – the finale will at last see the survivors tackle a new foe: nature. Our heroes will face a dangerous winter blizzard in the episode, which will be the first time the TV show has adapted the comic book notion of the characters facing extreme weather conditions.
As for this so-called left turn, we’ll just have to wait and see what it is when The Walking Dead 9×16 “The Storm” airs on AMC this Sunday, March 31st.