The Walking Dead Season 5 Is So Disturbing Some Scenes Might Not Air On TV

Considering The Walking Dead has included scenes of child murder and a man ripping another man’s throat out with his teeth, what scenes could possibly be so disturbing that they could not make it to TV?

Spoiler Warning: In order to try to answer this question, we’ve described some of the scenes from the comic books that might just be outside the bounds for television.

There are actually a few choices; around this time in the comics, Maggie attempted suicide and then withdrew from Glenn and the rest of the group for a while emotionally. That’s not something that could be as gruesome as much of what we’ve seen on The Walking Dead before, but of course it would be more disturbing and jarring to the audience of the show. Also, it would directly impact Cohan, and thus explain why she might be the one talking about it.

Also around that time, they turned Rick’s roaring rampage of revenge against the Marauders into just the beginning of a period in time where the group’s savagery increased substantially. It all built to the discovery of the Alexandria Safe-Zone and questions about whether Rick and his group of survivors could ever live in a “civilized” environment again after everything they’d had to do — questions that Carl started to raise in the Season Four finale — but kicked off in earnest with Rick, Michonne and company brutally dispatching the Hunters.

That group — widely expected to be the inspiration for the residents of Terminus — was a gang of cannibals who mutilated one of Rick’s group (Dale, who’s long dead on TV) and stalked them, hoping to trap and eat them. In the end, they begged for mercy and tried to run but Rick led the group in savagely killing them and then burning their bodies. The exact nature of their attack on the Hunters was not seen on-panel, but it was repeatedly referenced as a moment that affected everyone in the group.

Negan beating Glenn to death with a baseball bat is, of course, the one that springs immediately to mind (even though it seems very unlikely we’ll see Negan, or Glenn’s death, especially this early in the season). It was not only gruesome and gratuitous, but it impacted one of the main characters of the series, which made the emotional wallop worse.

Update: Facebook Reader Dustin Taylor correctly notes that we missed a fairly significant one: the gunshot that took Carl’s eye and, for a minute, convinced the readership that the future series lead may in fact have died. The splash page in the comics was pretty horrific, and doing anything similar to a kid would be impossible on TV.