However, the TV retelling of the comic made several changes to the original material.
One of the biggest changes from page to screen involved the first future Savior that Negan encountered.
Why have Laura be the first Savior on the scene in this backstory?
Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Lindsley Register in ‘The Walking Dead’.Josh Stringer/AMC
As showrunnerAngela Kangreveals, that was not the original plan.
“We wanted to bring back somebody that was a former Savior,” Kang says.
So why didn’t Dwight appear?
Jeffrey Dean Morgan and Hilarie Burton in ‘The Walking Dead’.Josh Stringer/AMC
Blame it on theTWDspin-off Austin Amelio now calls home… and the real-world pandemic.
“But because COVID pushed everything, it wouldn’t have worked to bring him over.”
With Dwight out of the picture, the writers had to come up with a new plan.
And then she joined our heroes until Beta killed her."
(Oh, right.
Bummer for her.)
“That’s how we wound up bringing her in,” Kang says.
That’s when episode writer David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick stepped in.
“It was partly a matter of circumstance,” says Kang.
And yet it was so easy to turn her back to our hero side."
We talked about, “Can we slot it in season 9?
Can we slot it in season 10?
When can we do it?”
So it felt like this was a good place to put this.
He’s talked a lot about his past with Lucille.
And although it’s a different setting, we’d stolen some pieces of that from a comic too.
What made you all want to work your way progressively backward in terms of the structure?
That really came from our writer, David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick.
He came in and said, “I have this idea for the structure of this story.
I was trying to think about Negan and how you get from the present into this flashback.
Then Lucille has her own flashback within that flashback, and then it unwinds itself back out.
It was all based on well, who is Negan as a person?
How does he tell a story about the past?
Why does Lucille eventually take her own life and put that plastic bag over her head?
Is that just her speeding along the inevitable?
But when he left, if you follow the timeline, he was gone for some weeks.
So I think that that was really what went on.
But she was thinking about it, I think, for awhile.
He was so fixated on the idea that he could save her that it all passed by.
We’ll start to learn more about that relationship between Negan and Maggie as we get into season 11.
