WARNING: The following contains spoilers for The Walking Dead Season 11B, which is currently airing on AMC.
One more new Walking Dead spinoff show was just announced by AMC, this one centered around Lauren Cohan’s Maggie Rhee and Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s Negan Smith. As exciting as that sounds, The Walking Dead is attempting to shoot itself in the foot by practically announcing the fates of two important characters and throwing away the dramatic stakes of its final season.
The spinoff, titled Isle of the Dead, will follow Maggie and Negan as they explore the undead in New York City, which is awfully close to a CRM community from The Walking Dead: World Beyond. Cohan, Morgan and The Walking Dead Chief Content Officer Scott M. Gimple are set to executive produce alongside Eli Jorné as showrunner. AMC Studios may be beaming with excitement over this announcement, but they’re leaving fragmented pieces of Season 11 behind in the process.
In The Walking Dead‘s height of success between its first and sixth seasons, the show let the tension work for itself, which led to some jaw-dropping moments in television history. The Season 5 premiere was one of the most highly-acclaimed in the series because the Season 4 finale left nothing else to think about but the next episode. There were no spin-offs or movies that questioned the entire integrity of the show’s premise, and it was peaceful. Even when Fear The Walking Dead began on the network, that spinoff didn’t stray from the main series’ motivations. Fear The Walking Dead was its own show and The Walking Dead was its own as well.
That all changed when The Walking Dead: World Beyond arrived. To be fair, World Beyond wasn’t intentionally meant to be Rick Grimes’ story, but constant teases of his reappearance in The Walking Dead universe led to theories that it was, and that ruined the series as a whole with high expectations that were never met. The exhilaration over Andrew Lincoln possibly making his return as the iconic character must have turned on a lightbulb in Gimple’s head: if a spin-off pertaining to a beloved main character is what fans want, that’s what fans will get. It’s the right idea for Maggie and Negan’s story — but the wrong execution.
After it was announced that The Walking Dead would be ending after Season 11, an anthology series titled Tales of The Walking Dead and a Daryl/Carol spin-off were all that was talked about — not because the latter was about two fan-favorites, but because it kind of spoiled their fates in the series. Since Daryl and Carol are getting their own show, it means they survive the final season, which allows fans to let out a sigh of relief but also puts a damper on any anticipation of the finale. The only way another outcome would be possible is if their spinoff takes place in the six-year time jump after Rick’s disappearance, but that seems unlikely since their stories left them separated for a while.
Maggie and Negan are suffering from the same fate. They have to survive the main series because of Isle of the Dead. There is no other plausible explanation for why the characters with the most heated Walking Dead rivalry are venturing together in a distant city. Not only does the spinoff announcement confirm that Maggie survives the series and may not take up her comic book storyline as President of the Commonwealth, but it’s also revealed that viewers haven’t seen the last of Negan, who mysteriously departed the group after the Reaper storyline wrapped up. Furthermore, it’s a sad development for Maggie and Glenn fans, because they learn that Maggie not only accepted Negan being alive, but has now partnered with him for an unknown reason.
It’s unfortunate that The Walking Dead writers seem to have given up on the show that began their universe. Back in its glory days, viewers went awry on Twitter over the controversial Season 6 cliffhanger that left viewers to theorize for months who was the victim of Negan’s brutal beating, and now Twitter is quiet when it comes to recent deaths on the show. The multitude of spinoffs makes it easy for the writers to give fans the satisfaction of their favorite character surviving the series — but it also feels like a cheat that erases the sense of any dramatic stakes in the remainder of Season 11.
New episodes of The Walking Dead’s final season airs every Sunday at 9 pm ET on AMC, and is available to stream a week early on AMC+. Isle of the Dead is expected to arrive on AMC and AMC+ in 2023.
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