Create a free profile to get unlimited access to exclusive videos, sweepstakes, and more!
'The Walking Dead' survivors are guarded and outnumbered in new teasers for final season
The end is almost nigh on The Walking Dead, but there's still plenty of story ground to cover in the upcoming eleventh and final season, especially with Michael James Shaw's Mercer, the head of the Commonwealth armed forces, finally making the jump from the pages of the comic to the small screen.
You can see glimpses of Mercer (and his shiny red suit) in some of the new teasers AMC has released below, alongside other survivors, including Daryl (Norman Reedus), Carol (Melissa McBride), Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), Eugene (Josh McDermitt), Ezekiel (Khary Payton), Yumiko (Eleanor Matsuura), Gabriel (Seth Gilliam), Princess (Paola Lázaro), Alden (Callan McAuliffe), Aaron (Ross Marquand), and returning fan favorite Maggie (Lauren Cohan).
There's no actual footage from the upcoming season, however, there are a lot of great still shots of the characters looking cool. Below the teasers, we've also got new production photos of the survivors, along with some of the other characters like Jerry (Cooper Andrews) and Judith (Cailey Fleming).
As for what fans can expect from the series next season, showrunner Angela Kang told Entertainment Weekly back in April that the show will return to the "scope and scale" that fans originally fell in love with.
"[W]e’ll start seeing more stories again like the first episode — it's got everybody on Earth in the episode," she said. "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 [pandemic-shot bonus episodes] that we just watched back into our normal season."
And that's not all that's on the horizon for these final 24 episodes, which will be aired between 2021 and 2022. There's tension brewing between Maggie and Negan, which will play off the backstory revealed in the recent batch of bonus Season 10 episodes, all having to do with his late wife Lucile (Hilarie Burton).
"[Negan] got to the point where he remembered that she wanted him to fight, and she understood the importance of being with other people. That's one of the things that she says to him: 'We can't make it on our own. It's never going to happen,’" said Kang. "He's really thinking about the legacy of his wife and what she hoped for the two of them and what she hoped for him and has decided, 'You know what? I've earned my place here and I'm going to prove that I have a place here. And if that means I've got to face Maggie, even though that's something that is uncomfortable for me to face, and I don't want to, and it scares me in some ways, that's what I have to do.’"
And as fans are already well aware, the end of The Walking Dead doesn't mean the end of its larger universe. Not only is its spin-off Fear the Walking Dead coming back for a seventh season, but Daryl and Carol are getting their own spinoff — if they can manage to put aside their current differences. There's also the other already existing spinoff World Beyond, plus an additional anthology series. And original TWD leader Rick (Andrew Lincoln) will be at the center of a trilogy of sequel films that will follow his continued story in the world.
The final season of The Walking Dead premiers Aug. 22 on AMC, with the series finale airing next year. In the meantime, check out new photos of the cast in the upcoming season below.
