'The Walking Dead' Season 8 Spoilers: AMC, Scott Gimple Slammed by Star's Family Member for Midseason Finale; Decision Behind Latest Kill Revealed
"The Walking Dead" season 8 has pulled off its biggest departure yet and there is someone who feels very strongly about it.
[Spoiler Alert! Plot details about the winter finale "How It's Gotta Be" and "The Walking Dead" comics will be discussed below.]
Rick (Andrew Lincoln) will soon be without a son as it was revealed in the final moments of the midseason finale of "The Walking Dead" season 8 that Carl (Chandler Riggs) was bitten by a walker while he was trying to save Siddiq (Avi Nash) in episode 6, "The King, The Widow and Rick."
The actor has already confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter that the character will bite the dust when the show returns next year, leaving Lincoln the only original cast member standing.
Get Our Latest News for FREE
Riggs' onscreen dad will definitely be devastated but so is the young actor's real father William Riggs, who took to Facebook to express his frustration about how "The Walking Dead" season 8 winter finale panned out for Carl, slamming showrunner Scott Gimple:
Watching Gimple fire my son 2 weeks before his 18th birthday after telling him they wanted him for the next 3 years was disappointing. I never trusted Gimple or AMC but Chandler did. I know how much it hurt him. But we do absolutely know how lucky we have been to be a part of it all and appreciate all the love from fans all these years!
Riggs was on "The Walking Dead" since he was 11 and fans watched him grow up on the show. His character was supposed to be untouchable, especially since Carl was being groomed to be the leader of the new world.
Add to that is the fact that he lasts way beyond the All Out War in the comics by Robert Kirkman. In fact, he is still very much alive in the source material.
In the abovementioned THR interview, Riggs admitted that like everyone else, he did not expect Carl to "ever get killed off" and that it was "devastating" for him and his family.
But he believes his death "serves a good purpose" in "The Walking Dead" moving forward not just for Rick but also all other characters.
During the interview, Riggs explained why Gimple made the decision to kill off Carl's TV counterpart:
In the comics, Scott was trying to figure out why there was a hole between Rick slitting Negan's (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) throat at the end of the "All-Out War" arc and then there's the time jump and Negan is alive and in prison and Rick didn't kill Negan. Scott was trying to figure out how to bridge the gap between Rick not wanting to kill Negan and Rick also really wanting to kill Negan, which he does right now [in the show's story]. Scott's way to get around that was to make Carl this really humanitarian figure and person who could see the good in people and see that people can change and not everyone out there is bad. That's what Carl's talk to Rick was in this episode: there's no way that they can kill every one of the Saviors and not everyone is a bad person and there has to be some way forward than just killing people.
It will be interesting to see how Rick copes with this loss or if he ever will. After all, his motivation in all these years of fighting and surviving in "The Walking Dead" was to make sure his children will grow up in a world they can call theirs. Riggs speculates that he might turn his focus on young Judith instead.
Riggs put off college for a year for acting and music and even bought a house near where "The Walking Dead" is being filmed. Despite this, he still sees Carl's death as a positive:
It ended up being a great thing because now I get to do all kinds of other stuff that I haven't been able to do in the last eight years.
While it was unexpected, Riggs is happy that Carl is going out a hero. "The Walking Dead" season 8, episode 9 will mark the character's final episode:
Episode 809 is really Carl trying to teach Rick as much as he can about what he's learned and trying to convince Rick to not kill every single Savior because there's still good people out there. The Alexandrians, the Hilltop and the Kingdom — all those people probably see him as a villain like the Saviors. There's some humanitarian aspects that Carl is going to try and teach Rick in his final moments.
Carl's death goes to show that no one is safe in "The Walking Dead," which leads fans to believe that Rick could go out too. Whether this could happen soon or not remains to be seen.
