Everything comes full circle.
And the unknown is where the characters were left.
soldier for the CRM.
Alexa Mansour on ‘The Walking Dead: World Beyond’.Steve Swisher/AMC
Not everyone made it that far.
But the biggest reverberations in theWalking Deaduniverse were still to come.
He also expressed a desire to see more of the “variant cohorts.”
Hal Cumpston on ‘The Walking Dead: World Beyond’.Steve Swisher/AMC
Was this the lab where the zombie plague began?
Are faster, stronger zombies on the horizon in theWalking Deaduniverse?
Will we be meeting the rest of the Violet and Primrose teams on otherTWDshows?
Pollyanna McIntosh and Julia Ormond on ‘The Walking Dead: World Beyond’.Steve Swisher/AMC
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Let’s start with the tag scene.
It has more of a relationship to the greaterWalking Deaduniverse than it does directly toWorld Beyond.
But it’s a peek into a story that we will tell.
Annet Mahendru on ‘The Walking Dead: World Beyond’.Steve Swisher/AMC
And I’m actually talking definitively.
Whereare you going to tell that story?
GIMPLE: I’m definitely not telling you.
Okay, let’s try this: Are these French scientists responsible for starting the plague?
But I’m tempted to tell you.
GIMPLE: I think it’s like a better story than me telling you right now.
So now I’m not going to tell.
But I guess I would say, don’t just flatly believe everything you read scrolled in paint.
That might be true, but I wouldn’t say it’s true because it’s painted.
GIMPLE: There’s more to what Jenner is talking about.
And what we saw is, first of all, not super-powered in any way.
That’s a thin door, and not the end state of that walker necessarily.
Is it a total redoing of everything we’re doing?
No, it is not.
And it’s specific to a story we’re telling in a place we’re telling it.
That’s a fair takeaway from that scene, correct?
GIMPLE: I mean, it’s a fair takeaway of the scene.
But it’s not the end state of the walker.
And I’m not saying that death is the end state of a walker.
Okay, let’s get to the rest of the episode.
The group is getting to Portland, but we don’t know how that will go.
Silas is undercover in CRM gearno idea how that will work out.
Kublek is in prison, what happens ultimately with that?
Tell me about the decision to give us some closure, but not too much.
GIMPLE: It’s a big world and there’s a lot going on.
But you see Jadis ascendant moving into a position of power.
You see Elizabeth leaving that position of power.
The folks onFearand the folks onWalking Deadare in sort of the same positions.
There are big things going on all around them, and granted, most of it is the apocalypse.
But they’re not necessarily running the apocalypse.
It’s sort of in line with that way of thinking.
But the story continues, and we hope to have that continue.
Are there specific plans for these people to be showing up on otherWalking Deadshows?
GIMPLE: It’s more about hopes and dreams and wishes because we’re not this giant organization.
We make plans and we pivot.
We want to continue this story in different ways.
And about Silas,ishe undercover?
Might be undercover, might have just found some purpose.
And Jadis is a pretty good salesperson.
So the greaterWalking Deadstory, the meta story, the whole story, it continues on and on.
And thus, I imagine these other characters will pop up in those stories.
Will every single one of them pop up like clockwork in the very next thing we do?
I doubt it, but we’re doing a lot of things.
That story will have to have a reckoning.
GIMPLE: I would just say yes.
To me that’s showrunning.
But then you wonderfully have these opportunities to do it.
So yeah, there’s three to five different ways that Jadis could be showing up next.
What about making Jadis go full villain here as your main antagonist?
You reformed her onThe Walking Deadand then took her all the way back and then some here.
I mean, clear-cut villain?
Well, clear cut antagonist at the very least.
GIMPLE: I’ll go with that.
She was trying to go straight.
She was involved in some manipulations of her own as Jadis with the Scavengers.
She tried to fold into this group of Alexandria and they kind of turned on her.
And that is what the CRM meant to her.
I kept waiting for us to meet Major General Beale.
Why not, and is he someone that might be showing up elsewhere?
NEGRETE: OnWorld Beyond, he was mentioned specifically as to how things were run.
That wasn’t whatWorld Beyondwas about.
So I would venture to say that at some point we may see a story with him.
Someone big often has to die in a series finale.
NEGRETE: It just felt like the right end of her story to us.
In season 1, a friend of Felix, we don’t know that much about her.
Is she Jennifer or is she Huck?
And where does she come down at the end of the day?
Where are her loyalties?
You don’t need to do those things.
She doesn’t support the decisions her mother has made, or that Jadis has made for that matter.
And so it just felt right emotionally in terms of her greater redemption for this series.
So where would the show have gone had it lasted longer than two seasons?
Whatdidn’twe get to see?
GIMPLE: The basic start of everything was about growing up.
And so we knew it was close-ended.
We weren’t sure how close-ended.
Is it three years?
Is it five years?
We know sort of where they’re going for the most part.
I will say, Silas is maybe the larger question mark in that equation.
But we saw Iris sort of become set as a leader.
GIMPLE: And believing in the future where she didn’t believe in the next day.
She’s sitting there every day rolling her sleeves up to work towards the future.
NEGRETE: And I think that for Elton, his goal was to see the world.
Everything that he knew about the world was very intellectual, he hadn’t experienced it.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
