The Walking Dead season 9 premiere: Is Xander Berkeley leaving?
Tonight, it was Xander Berkeley’s character of Gregory who was killed off over the course of the extended premiere. The character was hanged close to the end of the episode, mostly as a result of his attempts to force Maggie out of power. He really did not like the fact that she was voted in as the right person to rule the Hilltop.
Basically, Gregory’s attempt at a coup ended up being one of the worst attempts at a coup out there.
Berkeley had a pretty great run on this show as his character, who surprisingly made it a good bit longer than we really imagined. After all, he was in the midst of the power struggle at the Hilltop for a really long time. How many opportunities are you going to give a dude like this?
In speaking about the decision to kill off this character to Entertainment Weekly, executive producer Angela Kang had the following to say about taking the iconic hanging scene out of the comics:
With the Gregory execution, we’ve been sort of building to that for a long time. I think from seasons ago, there was always the intention that we would play that iconic moment from the comics. But of course, we remixed it, in that the murder attempt doesn’t happen quite the same way. Some of the series of events are a little bit different. But we wanted to show that Maggie gave Gregory a lot of chances, and he did weaselly things each time. He seems a little incapable of making any change stick.
Really, what Kang is saying here is one of the biggest understatements of all time. Gregory had about a trillion chances to make things better and fit in more.
Related – What’s the status of Carol and Ezekiel?
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