With the hype train barreling down the tracks in advance of the ninth season of The Walking Dead, star Lauren Cohan has just dropped an almighty clanger that I think spoils her character’s fate on the show.
We already knew that both Maggie and Andrew Lincoln’s Rick Grimes are set to depart TWD this season, with fans eagerly speculating on whether they’ll get a happy ending or wind up as walker chow. Now, it seems as if we can stop discussing Maggie’s fate, at least.
In an interview with GameSpot, Cohan was talking about her departure from the show and said the following:
“It feels like the greatest way to honor it is to keep it open-ended because whether it’s about me going back as Maggie or whether it’s about me just taking in, absorbing, and honoring everything I’ve learned there. It never leaves me. It will never, ever leave me. And that is I think the greatest compliment you can give to anything and to any group of people because we all came together to make something that we didn’t know was going to have this success that it did.”
The key words there are the possibility of her “going back” as Maggie, which sounds like a cast iron confirmation that the character’s going to survive whatever happens to her in season 9. And though that’s sure to please fans, knowing this in advance is certainly a little disappointing.
After all, one of the main reasons I was looking forward to the next season was because it seemed to promise that major cast members like Rick and Maggie might succumb to the same grisly fate as so many of their fellow characters, cementing the danger and nihilism that makes The Walking Dead such a compelling experience (most of the time, anyway).
Oh well, I’ll still be hoping that Rick Grimes dies a particularly memorable and grisly death come October.
