However much you love The Walking Dead, there are times when you also probably hope everyone's suffering in this zombie apocalypse will eventually come to an end. The comic's creator and show's executive producer Robert Kirkman does in fact have an ending in mind. But no one else does, he recently revealed to Entertainment Weekly.
"No, there’s no communication whatsoever," Kirkman said when asked whether he gives AMC and showrunner Scott Gimple advance notice of things like character deaths. "Scott Gimple is an avid reader of the comic, and prefers to experience the comic book as a reader, so he gets the advance issues as they’re published, but he doesn’t read scripts. He gets mad at me if I give him any kind of indication as to what’s coming, because he doesn’t like spoilers. So, they’re kind of a hundred percent in the dark, which I guess is pretty remarkable, and I would probably say it’s a testament to the trust that AMC has in me."
That spoiler-free policy sounds great for readers, but it's got to be tough for the people in charge of, say actors' contracts. Or the actors themselves, who never know when they might meet their end in a horde of zombies or in a brutal death by baseball bat. Kirkman did give us one clue about how he decides who will die.
"I tend to kill [my favorite characters], just because when I find myself real attached to a character, or if I find myself wanting to write them more and more and steering more story toward them, I kind of realize that that means that audience investment in that character is extremely high, and I don’t want it to affect the story too much by focusing too much on that character. And that tends to make me want to kill them."
Before you condemn the guy for being so sadistic, just remember, again, that this is going to end one day. "I know what the end point is, and at the end of the day, I want this entire long narrative to be a complete story with a beginning, middle, and end."