Lauren Cohan Wants The Walking Dead To End With A 40-Year Time Jump

Lauren Cohan only just returned to The Walking Dead in this past weekend’s season 10 finale, but she’s now set to remain with the series until it concludes after eleven seasons in 2022. With the end in sight, then, the actress – who’s been with the show since season 2, though she took sometime out partway through season 9 – has started thinking about how she wants it all to wrap up and her aims for the character of Maggie’s fate. And they’re very intriguing.

While speaking to NME, Cohan revealed what she thinks would be the perfect way for the story to conclude, explaining that she’s hoping for a “40-year time jump” where the audience will be introduced to an elderly Maggie, confirming that she managed to survive all the zombie attacks and other threats and live a long, full life.

“It would be really, really fun if we got to do a 40-year time jump. You sort of peel back and start on a close-up of some very elderly hands and it takes a minute to figure out whose they are. Once you realise whose [hands] they are, where they are and where the world is now and what that means and who’s with her… maybe it’s her final days. Maybe she doesn’t die by a zombie? That’s an idea.”

It’s handy that Cohan is hoping for this kind of ending, as it’s pretty likely that something like this will come to pass. Maybe it won’t be as huge as 40 years, but a major jump forward in time is definitely on the cards, assuming that the TV series picks up that critical idea from the final issue of the comic book. In the source material, Maggie ends up being the new president of the Commonwealth in a world where the walker outbreak is completely under control.

Of course, Cohan finally made a comeback as the character in the season 10 finale, with the former Hilltop leader arriving just in the nick of time to save Gabriel from a grisly fate at the hands of some Whisperers. She also came with a personal bodyguard – the mysterious masked man who we’ve yet to learn the identity of.

The Walking Dead will return to AMC for six additional episodes of season 10 in early 2021, with production on the new installments kicking off this month.