The Walking Dead: First look at The Commonwealth's Mercer in final season teaser trailer

AMC's The Walking Dead is shambling toward its eleventh and final season, which just dropped a short teaser that heralds the arrival of Michael James Shaw as Mercer, a former military man turned hardened leader of the Commonwealth armed forces.

The character's got a pretty awesome red suit of armor ripped straight from the pages of the original comic by Robert Kirkman. Mercer's underling soldiers, meanwhile, have outfits of white and black that recall Star Wars' Stormtroopers (the design of their armor is also directly inspired by the source material). Makes you wonder why our heroes haven't been suiting up like this the entire time we've known them. A Walker probably can't get their rotting teeth through that sturdy-looking material.

Check out the teaser below:

Beyond the Mercer reveal, the teaser doesn't actually have any footage from Season 11. As you can see, it's mostly just epic shots of the main characters like Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), Maggie (Lauren Cohan), Daryl (Norman Reedus), Carol (Melissa McBride), Yumiko (Eleanor Matsuura), Gabriel (Seth Gilliam), Princess (Paola Lázaro), Ezekiel (Khary Payton), Alden (Callan McAuliffe), Eugene (Josh McDermitt), and Aaron (Ross Marquand).

"Just in very broad terms, I'll say that [in] Season 11, we get to come back more of our usual scope and scale that people are used to," showrunner Angela Kang teased to Entertainment Weekly back in April. "So we'll start seeing more stories again like the first episode — it's got everybody on Earth in the episode. And tons of zombies and lots of action and fun and intrigue, and locations we've never seen, and things like that. So just stylistically, there will be a change from these six [episodes] that we just watched back into our normal season."

The Walking Dead's final season premieres on AMC Sunday, Aug. 22. Following the series finale next year, Daryl Dixon and Carol Peletier (Melissa McBride) will hit the road on Daryl's motorcycle for their very own spinoff. The currently-untitled show is slated to arrive in 2023. Plus, there's also the matter of Andrew Lincoln's Rick-focused film series, which is also in the works.