The Walking Dead Report: Midseason Finale Features No [Spoiler]

While we haven't yet seen the midseason finale of AMC's The Walking Dead and cannot speak to the efficacy of the spoilers currently making the rounds, our sources indicate they're on the level. Therefore, this story likely contains spoilers for Sunday's episode, "Made to Suffer".

According to Spoil the Dead, the upcoming midseason finale of AMC's The Walking Dead, the final new episode of the series until February 2013, will break with the finale tradition of The Walking Dead and feature no big, shocking death of any of a series regular. The first season finale ended with Jacqui choosing to remain behind and die when the CDC exploded; last year's midseason finale concluded with the revelation that Sophia had been dead and renaimated for some time, while the second season finale was an all-out orgy of death, most notably Shane's. But an episode recap of the upcoming show suggests that while one of Rick's allies will die in the episode, it won't be a major character and the person in question is unlikely to be mourned for long by the viewers (although some characters may be more affected by the loss than others). There are really only a couple of survivors among Rick's group that fit this description, but in the interest of not fully spoiling the reveal we're electing not to reveal the character's gender, or whether the death takes place in Woodbury or at the prison. Many fans speculated at the start of the season that the midseason finale would be a crazed, violent experience not unlike what we saw in "The Killer Inside." And while there's certainly plenty of action and conflict in the offing, per the same episode description, that key death that shakes up the group dynamic isn't there yet (although a couple of characters' lives are left hanging in the balance, setting up for the kind of midseason premiere that's likely to be one of the show's highest-rated episodes).