When Fear The Walking Dead returns this Sunday night for its fourth season, fans have been told to expect a fresh new show that won’t even require you to have seen the previous three seasons of the show. In a similar fashion, it seems The Walking Dead is hitting the reboot button for its next season, meaning that this Sunday’s finale is going BIG.
Beginning with Season 9, current Walking Dead showrunner Scott M. Gimple has been promoted into the new position of “chief content officer” for the entire franchise, with longtime writer and executive producer Angela Kang taking over from Gimple as the new showrunner of the main series. And new blood means new storylines.
SPOILERS FOR FANS
These storylines include comic villains “The Whisperers”, a group that uses walker skins as camouflage and use the dead to their advantage, and “The Commonwealth”, the newest group recently announced in the comics as a group of 50,000 people that could pose a threat to our communities in Virginia. Whether or not the writers choose to cover these stories in order or at the current timeframe is yet to be seen.
SPOILERS END.
Speaking with Entertainment Weekly, Gimple teased Season 8’s finale being the end of many things:
“This episode isn’t just like these 15 episodes coming to a conclusion, but Angela and myself and the writers had always talked about this in many ways being sort of the conclusion of the first eight seasons,” Gimple explained. “This show will be very much a new show next year and with a bigger, new narrative. It was something I was really excited about getting into even before season 8. And so there was just a certain weight in the air of the kind of conclusion that we were getting closer to. It was a weird graduation for everybody.”
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From what we get out of this, we can say that this is the end of a chapter, and that when we return to The Walking Dead in October 2018, we will pick up with our group sometime after the conclusion of All Out War during a New Beginning, where our characters will be living a very different life than we’ve seen them before.
As this season’s ratings have suggested, The Walking Dead is in need of, at the very least, a fresh feeling again, so this all sounds good to us. While a lot of the story is on point this season, we do have to admit this season has had plenty of weak points here and there. Here’s hoping this Sunday night’s Season 8 finale is satisfying and conclusive. More importantly, here’s hoping the show makes good on Gimple’s promise of new storylines going forward. We’ll get to know more details about what’s to come when we reach SDCC 2018 this summer.
AMC’s The Walking Dead Season 8 Finale premieres April 15 9 pm EST, followed by Fear the Walking Dead Season 4 Premiere.
