The Walking Dead's Finale Reshoots Revealed?

For weeks leading up to the season finale of AMC's The Walking Dead, there was a kind of anarchic sense that anything could happen, because there had been what were described over and over again by insiders as "major reshoots" on the episode. Locals who could see some of the filming, for instance, can frequently be counted on as sources of information. "Oh, I saw Daryl and Rick in Woodbury for the finale shoot," somebody would say, "so they're alive after the big shoot-out in the previous episode." But suddenly the idea that potentially big chunks of the pilot had been reshot and re-edited meant that those reports were worth little. After all, the argument went, what if the incoming showrunner had decided that they didn't need a character anymore, but that character had already been "confirmed" as alive? Well, in a new interview out this weekend, recurring actor Dallas Roberts appears to have revealed the key part of the show that was reshot. While it's certainly possible there's more to it than this, it sounds as though the reshoots wouldn't have materially affected what could and could not have been seen by locals or expected going into the final episode. A few days ago, we brought you some images from an alternate, more gruesome death scene for Andrea. She would have been devoured by Milton without the benefit of first freeing herself, and would have been long since dead by the time her body was discovered, still trapped in the barber's chair. No emotional moment with Michonne, no self-inflicted gunshot wound to manage her fate. Roberts described the sequence in some detail in a magazine interview, and revealed that the less-heroic death for Andrea wasn't just an alternate take, but was the version originally intended to air and that the actors were called back for reshoots when it was decided to give the viewers a different, less gruesome but more emotional approach to the character's death.

"Originally, the beating scene that started the episode wasn't there," Dallas told Entertainment Weekly. "Originally, I showed up and was led into the room where Andrea was and I took the tools out – the instruments of torture that were laid on the table – and then he shot me in the stomach, completely unexpectedly. And then I was left to bleed out in the same idea basically – you're going to kill her now. "There was a lot more of Milton trying to open the door and him trying to free her from the chains, and then there was a section where he was going to wrap the chain around the neck and try to choke her to death before he turned so she wouldn't have to deal with Walker Milton, or Biter Milton, as it were. "And then at the end of that, it was just Tyreese and someone else who found her. Rick and Daryl and Michonne weren't there. So it was essentially the same idea, except you saw me taking chunks out of Laurie Holden in that version. And then they called us back a few months later to reshoot it and made all those changes."

So while that certainly would have been a radically different cut of the episode (DVD extras, please?), it wouldn't have materially changed the things everyone talks about at the end of the day: zombie Milton killed Andrea after he himself had been killed/created by the Governor. It also explains where all of those pictures have come from (they've been floating around the Internet and were even featured on Talking Dead) that showed zombie Milton wearing his glasses. That was driving us crazy.