“The Walking Dead” creator Robert Kirkman shares why he HAD to kill you-know-who
If you don’t already know who dies in the Season 7 premiere of The Walking Dead, you might have some magical powers of spoiler-avoidance – you might want also want to pause in reading this and go watch it, like, post haste.
If this isn’t you, then you know that the episode features a gruesome death that shattered our hearts (and made us feel pretty sick). TBH, Glenn was the last person we wanted to see get up close and personal with Negan’s barbed wire-covered baseball bat, Lucille. However, his death comes straight out of the comic book so it wasn’t actually a huge surprise – and now The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman has revealed why it had to transfer to the show.
Despite actor Steven Yeun being totally okay with the way his character died on the show, we were all pretty much totally horrified. Glenn was a character we loved, and he almost died last season – so we thought, maybe, he was in the clear. However, Glenn surviving this encounter with Negan simply wasn’t in the cards.
To Kirkman’s credit, he admits that the show considered not killing Glenn: “We did discuss options. At the end of the day, we were like, pulling the thread on this sweater just pulls too many things apart and it’s too difficult to get back on that trajectory without that death.”
While the show does deviate from the comics – for example, Abraham dies in a totally different scenario in the comic – some moments just influence too much of the story to be altered. Said Kirkman:
“It’s just that there’s a lot of material that comes from Glenn’s death in the comics. And while we do try to change things up to keep things interesting for the audience, and for me, this is one that there’s so much that comes from Rick, there’s so much with Negan, because that character is someone that he killed, and definitely Maggie is someone that kind of gets put on the trajectory that affects a great number of stories and a great number of characters moving forward. So it was kind of essential that that part of the scene at least remained intact, unfortunately.”
Kirkman also had a difficult time writing issue 100, where Glenn dies: “Glenn was actually the first death in the comic that happened after the person was cast… There are a lot of other big deaths that happened, but they were all done in the comic before the person was cast, so Glenn was actually the first time while I was writing the comic where I was like, ‘Oh, geez.’”
Ultimately, though, The Walking Dead creator believes Glenn’s death was necessary: “…it’s something that we all agree the story needs, and it definitely makes the show better and it makes things heightened and cool. It’s tough but we gotta do what we gotta do.”
We get it — but we’re never going to be totally okay with Glenn’s death.
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