“Walking Dead” Showrunner Defends Season 6's Ambiguous Cliffhanger

Warning: Major spoilers follow for the Season 6 finale of “The Walking Dead.”

“The Walking Dead” showrunner Scott M. Gimple now admits that he knew a lot of fans would be angry over “Last Day On Earth,” the Season 6 finale where, after a whole lot of buildup, the writers chose not to reveal the identity of Negan's victim at the hands of his barbed baseball bat, Lucille.

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In a chat with Entertainment Weekly, Gimple promises that fans will be rewarded for the long wait, ensuring that the cliffhanger wasn't created just to piss them off.

On the contrary, Gimple said, “[W]e wanted to give them a new experience, and to give them an experience of suspense and fear, because they don't know what's going to happen. What's actually happening on the show to characters, we want them to feel it. We want them to be surprised.”

Gimple goes on to illustrate how Negan's introduction is much different from the dumpster incident from two seasons ago, where the series made it look like Glenn was getting disemboweled by walkers, even though he wasn't.

“I think in the overarching tapestry of what the show is, these are individual stories that aren't particularly related. I suppose they do both have to do with loss. But I think it is, in some ways, the opposite. The dumpster story was somebody surviving something. It was about a character getting to live. It was really to put the audience in the place of the people in Alexandria. We didn't get to know what happened. It looked like he died but it wasn't unlocked, it wasn't a certainty. But the thing that allowed him to survive was the thing that made it look like he died, which was Nicholas' guts. So, hopefully that story was like, 'Oh, somebody survived! I went through this horrible thing where, oh my god, this character just died, and they survived.'”

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Head over to EW for the full interview with Gimple.

“The Walking Dead” returns to AMC on Sunday, October 23.

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