The Walking Dead‘s season 10 finale concluded on a mysterious note when we encountered a group of soldiers that looked like nothing else we’ve ever seen in the show. They were heavily armed and wearing hi-tech white and red armor with a distinct Imperial Stormtrooper vibe.
Fans of the comics will have recognized them as members of the Commonwealth, a community numbering about 50,000 with access to advanced technology and extravagant wealth. Their society is structured in a class system decided by your job prior to the apocalypse. So, if you were a builder, you’d be lower class and if you were a lawyer you’d be upper class. This arrangement causes tensions, but the Commonwealth smooths that over by offering luxuries that others can’t including concerts, sports events and restaurants.
It’s looking all but certain that the eleventh and final season will find our survivors dealing with this powerful group, who may be on the cusp of developing a vaccine against becoming a Walker. Most assumed we’d have to wait until later in the year to see them, but a preview for this week’s episode, “Splinter,” indicates that they’re back this coming Sunday.
The clip shows Paola Lazaro’s Princess under interrogation by a Commonwealth soldier, who begins quizzing her on where she was when civilization fell. The answer turns out to be Pittsburgh, hinting that the location could be a key factor in discovering the variants of the Walker pathogen.
Showrunner Angela Kang teased “Splinter” during the recent preview show, saying the following about it:
“The one episode that’s coming up, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s a whole big story to be played. There’s more characters within that group to meet, but we will start to get into them a bit, get a sense of their vibe, what they’re about, through our characters’ perspective. But there’s so much more cool story to come in Season 11.
Here’s this group, they show up, they’re wearing this white armor which is not super practical, but also they had to create these uniforms. It’s really cool in a comic when you’ve got this look, but it’s like, ‘What does it mean about this group that they’re part of? They had to have some ability to create these things and keep them clean and make them all look the same, but they’re also ingenious because they’ve got these sort of like automatic weapons that they’ve also transformed with a bayonet, so it’s the old and the new all mixed together.
It tells you that this group is really formidable, they are organized, they have some access to the materials that you need to create in a uniform fashion, so that’s really unlike some of the groups that we’ve seen. Because our groups have only been able to do things like that on a very limited basis, like [how] Eugene was only able to make a handful of perfect bullets. But these guys have a lot more going on.”
The Walking Dead is currently midway through its extended tenth season, with new episodes premiering Sundays at 9 pm ET/8c on AMC.