Over the past couple of seasons, The Walking Dead has developed a particular love of time jumps. First of all, season 9 skipped ahead 18 months from the end of season 8. Then, when Rick Grimes went missing, presumed dead in episode 5 of that season, things hopped forward a whole six years later, finding our survivors in a very different place. The timeline has remained steady since then, but as we head into season 11, we may be due for another major time jump.
Sources close to WGTC – the same ones who previously told us that a Scream reboot was in the works and Ryan Reynolds had a secret cameo in Hobbs & Shaw – have informed us that fans should prepare for a significant time jump in TWD season 11. We’re hearing that, at some time during the next run of the show, another leap into the future will occur and though we weren’t able to get an exact timeframe for how far ahead it’ll move things along, we’re told that the time jump will be “huge.”
That’s all we have to go on, but it would seem this concept is inspired by the final issue of the comics. Last summer, creator Robert Kirkman shocked us all by ending the book with issue #193, which jumped forward 25 years and introduced a world where society had got back on track and zombies were no longer a threat. If the series was to faithfully adapt the comics, though, it would still have some 20 issues to get through before it reached that stage, so maybe the finale time jump is going to be reimagined for TV.
Of course, Kirkman himself recently teased that this was a possibility for the show in an interview with Hey Fandom, explaining that he thought there was a lot of potential in the final issue that he believes could fuel a bunch of fresh storylines on the screen. But, then again, we’ve also heard that season 12 could be the series’ last, so who knows how this could play out.
Personally, I’d speculate that this time jump could occur later in season 11, as there’s some material that needs to be tackled first before they switch things up again, including that crossover with Fear the Walking Dead, but we don’t currently know for sure when that’ll happen. In any case, it sounds like we’re in store for another significant jump forward in time and as soon as we learn more about it, we’ll be sure to let you know.
