Andrew Lincoln Says The Walking Dead Season 8 Finale’s Epic And Emotional

It’s been an emotional ride, full of moderate highs and tragic lows, but the Alexandrians and their allies’ battle against Negan and his Saviors is almost at an end. The “All-Out War” storyline which has provided the backbone of the past year of AMC’s zombie drama will come to a close when The Walking Dead season 8 finale reaches us in just a couple more weeks.

Ahead of the exciting conclusion, star Andrew Lincoln caught up with EW to tease what fans can expect from it and promised that the episode will contain pretty much everything you’d want. Thanks to an “unusual structure” and lots of emotion, Lincoln felt confident enough to describe it as “epic.”

“I would say this is a smorgasbord. I think you’ve got everything in this one. It’s quite an unusual structure, but it’s very emotional, I hope, because that’s what I felt [while filming]. It’s epic.”

One thing we do know about the episode is the location of where the final conflict between the allied communities and the Saviors will take place. Instead of the showdown happening at Alexandria or the Hilltop or the Sanctuary, everything will come to a head in a wide open field, setting the scene for a grand, old-fashioned battle. Lincoln hopes that it will result in something “phenomenal,” too.

“The location we shot at was phenomenal and unusual. I hope that it’s going to look on screen as good as it felt when we were shooting there.”

The finale has been a long time coming, as Rick and his friends have been facing the Saviors since season 6, with Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s Negan first appearing in the last episode of that run. While the final installment of this season will act as a significant milestone for the series, it won’t simply offer up an ending. Lincoln hinted that it’ll sow the seeds for new developments to come in season 9, instead, calling it an “unusual” framework and explaining:

“It does feel like it completes something. But it also does feel that it offers a lot of interesting story arcs for the future, which is quite unusual.”

The Walking Dead season 8 airs its penultimate episode this Sunday. A week after that, on April 15th, it’ll come to a close with its final outing, before Fear the Walking Dead‘s fourth season kicks off the very same night.