The Walking Dead midseason finale: Andrew Lincoln on Carl Grimes shocker
In the closing minutes of the episode Sunday, we saw the character, played by Chandler Riggs, get bitten by a walker. While we didn’t necessarily see him die onscreen, this does seem to suggest the beginning of the end for him on the show. It’s hard to come back from a walker bite, unless of course the writers conjure up some magic way to make him better (or if they peel off all of that skin on his stomach and the bite didn’t go deep enough).
We could sit here and conjure up all sorts of ways in which AMC and Scott M. Gimple try to keep Carl alive, but at the end of the day it’s just hard to see it. The character is likely a goner, and for Andrew Lincoln we imagine that this exit has to be harder than most. Here’s what he had to say to Entertainment Weekly about when he first learned about the twist coming in the direction of the onscreen son:
“[Showrunner] Scott Gimple always makes a phone call to everybody, and he said to me, “You’re going to hate this one.” And I mentioned four names. None of them were right, and he had to tell me that it was the kid. I was so shocked that he said three times, “Are you there? Are you there? Are you there?” I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to say.
“I never saw it coming because I always thought that the kid would be the future, and that was the whole point of this — that I was going to hand over the revolver and let him walk off into the distance, you know? So it was incredibly shocking. Everybody was reeling from it and continue to reel from it.
“I mean, you can’t write a character like Rick Grimes — whose engines are his wife and his son — and you take away the wife and you’re left with the son. And then, of course, there’s Judith, but then you take away the other engine that fuels him, that got him off his deathbed in the first ever episode, and you take that away. That’s not done lightly, you know? And from this episode onwards, that s— got real.”
Obviously, this twist is going to be resolved when The Walking Dead returns, and maybe the death of Carl is what changes Rick and brings us to that Old Man Rick we see in flash-forwards. For now, though, everything is speculation of one form or another.
Below is what Chandler Riggs himself had to say following the episode.
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