Sunday night marked Andrew Lincoln’s final episode of AMC juggernaut “The Walking Dead.”
Lincoln, 45, was the center of the hit series since its inception in 2010, starring as the sheriff-turned-survivor Rick Grimes — and his time is finally up.
The penultimate episode left Rick impaled on on steel rod with a horde of staggering zombies bearing down on him. He cheated death once again, only to spend his final hour “finding his family” in a surreal fever dream of visits with long-lost cast members Shane Walsh (Jon Bernthal), Hershel Greene (the late Scott Wilson) and Sasha Williams (Sonequa Martin-Green)
One by one, they urge him to “wake up.”
In the end, he’s not reunited with his lost wife Lori or son Carl. It’s his chosen family members—Daryl, Maggie, and his love, Michonne—who attempt to come to his rescue. “I found them,” Rick says, as he fires a bullet into dynamite on the bridge, blowing the zombie herd to smithereens—and presumably sacrificing himself.
The big reveal: Rick isn’t dead.
He’s last seen being airlifted in a mysterious helicopter. And in another shocker—the episode ends with a time jump featuring a grownup version of Rick’s daughter, Judith Grimes.
Former showrunner (and current Chief Content Officer of “The Walking Dead” universe) Scott M. Gimple revealed in the post-mort on “Talking Dead” that Rick’s universe will be expanded in a series of original films to air on AMC.
“There’s something beautiful in the original DNA of the show in that it is all about change,” Lincoln told Entertainment Weekly of his exit. “The show will live on and it will continue to be great … It’s exciting because there is a sense that there is a new vision for the show.”
He added, “It’s a really exciting landscape that all of the characters are inhabiting. It’s the show I always thought we’d get to when I did the pilot — a pared down, much more dangerous and compromising and spare landscape … What I don’t want to do is stay too long when I think the show will actually benefit from other people taking the reins and forging a new path, and that’s what I think is happening now.”
1.He misses his off-screen family.
Lincoln explained his departure as simply the result of missing his wife and kids back home in his native U.K. while he filmed in Georgia for half the year.
“I have two young children, and I live in a different country, and they become less portable as they get older,” Lincoln explained to Entertainment Weekly in July. “It was that simple. It was time for me to come home.”
2.Lincoln's on-screen son knew he was done.
Chandler Riggs, who starred as Rick Grimes’ son, Carl, knew that Lincoln was itching to leave the series before his exit was announced.
“Actually him and I had been talking about it for a while, him like, leaving the show, so honestly I wasn’t that surprised to see that he was going to leave,” Riggs told “Entertainment Tonight” in September. “I was honestly really happy for him, because every year he had spent so much time working on the show [in Georgia] and he didn’t really get to spend that much time with his family. You only get to raise your kids once. So I’m really happy for him to be able to get to go home and really raise his kids and have a good time.”
3.He was devastated when Carl was killed off.
Lincoln admitted he was happy to never have to scream “Coral!” ever again when his onscreen son Carl (Chandler Riggs) was killed off, but he revealed that Carl’s death, a departure from the comics, likely made the character Rick Grimes not want to go on, and that Riggs’ exit was particularly hard on him.
“It was rough. You came out so sad,” Lincoln told Entertainment Weekly of Riggs leaving the series. “He’s been spectacular in all areas, as he pretty much has been the whole time I’ve known him … it’s been one of the greatest privileges to watch this man grow up on screen in front of my eyes. Saying goodbye is something that we’ve gotten used to on this show, but I’ll say it again — the wife and his son were the original chief things that got [Rick] out of that hospital bed in that first episode, and it’s terribly sad today. I’m like that guy left on the pier, you know? He’s lost his most precious cargo.”
Riggs himself told The Hollywood Reporter that his departure was “quite the shocker for [himself], Andy [Lincoln] and everyone. It was devastating for me and my family because the show has been such a huge part of my life for so long. … I didn’t expect for Carl to ever get killed off.”
To further drive home how unhappy everyone was, Riggs’ real-life father fumed in a Facebook post (via TV Line), “Watching [‘TWD’ executive producer Scott] Gimple fire my son two weeks before his 18th birthday after telling him they wanted him for the next three 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!”
4.His exit may have helped bolster the show's ratings.
“The Walking Dead” suffered from falling ratings all season, with the season 9 kickoff having the lowest premiere ratings in the series’ history — and the numbers fell steadily from there, Variety reported. However, Lincoln’s penultimate episode saw the ratings level off after a steady decline, indicating that fans may have at least wanted to issue the star a sweet sendoff. Still, to grasp just how huge this show is: Despite the falling ratings, “The Walking Dead” remains the No. 1 show on cable, beat out only by NFL games and “60 Minutes” on broadcast.
5.It was a long time coming.
During a panel at San Diego Comic-Con in July, Lincoln revealed that he’d discussed walking away from the show since as early as season 4.
“I suppose it was a lot to do with a conversation that Scott and I had a few years ago, maybe in season 4, about the shape and finding some way to complete something that was never going to be completed,” Lincoln told the crowd (via ScreenRant). “And then, obviously, not disturbing the mothership, y’know? There was a certain sense that this story has a man waking up and you experience this world through this one man’s eyes and it opens up into the extended family.”
He added that “the narrative has been freed up” because it’s clear that season 9 is “a different time … It feels like the show I always felt we would head toward when we wrapped the pilot.”
6.Other characters will fill different parts of Rick's shoes.
Norman Reedus’ fan favorite Daryl Dixon is poised to be the show’s lead after Lincoln leaves, reportedly netting the motorcycle enthusiast a cool $1 million per episode. Despite the hefty payday, in terms of character arc, Daryl isn’t the only one who’s filling in for Rick’s absence.
Showrunner Angela Kang told Entertainment Weekly that Michonne (Danai Gurira) will have a relationship with Negan similar to the one Rick (and Carl) had with the Big Bad in the comics.
“One of the stories in the comic is that Negan develops a really interesting relationship with Rick over time and sort of ends up giving him advice in very strange ways, but it’s always this strange, contentious at times, relationship,” Kang said. “We thought it would be so interesting to put Michonne in a position like that where here’s this guy who she just hates and wanted to kill, but ultimately was very much on board with keeping alive because of Carl’s wishes. And yet, she struggles with that decision too. That just seemed like an interesting, complicated thing.”
7.Norman Reedus already misses the hell out of him.
Norman Reedus, who’s taking over as the show’s lead, had an adorable moment filming Lincoln’s final scene with him, despite not being onscreen.
“The very last scene that we shot, he’s supposed to smile … and it was a close-up. So I kept sneaking in and tickling his feet and making him smile on this one line,” Reedus recalled to Entertainment Weekly. “And I thought it was funny. And he liked it. He kept asking me to keep doing it. So the last scene that he shot on this show, I’m below camera tickling his feet.”
Reedus confessed to having a tough time adjusting to not having Lincoln around on the set, especially during lunch breaks, which they’d spent together daily for nine years.
“I have to say eating lunch by myself in my trailer was really, really weird,” he admitted. “It made me really depressed. In my trailer right now, one of the chairs in there is covered in blood and it’s from Andy Lincoln’s last day. He had somebody’s blood all over him, and he left my chair covered in blood. And I still won’t let the cleaning guys clean off that chair, because that bloody chair reminds me of Andy every day. The whole trailer’s really clean except for one chair that’s covered in blood.”
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