Was That Walker Andrea In The Walking Dead Season 5 Premiere?

But did it also bring back one of the series’ longest-running regular characters?

Well, no, but it does seem like they brought back some of her clothes.

Fans on Reddit (that’s one of a few threads that cover the question) realized that, as you can see in the image above, one of the walkers on this week’s episode of The Walking Dead was wearing a shirt that had belonged to Andrea. That zombie — a blonde woman with a handcuff dangling from one arm and a mangled face — led them to wonder whether the self-inflicted gunshot wound that Andrea had used to kill herself and ensure she didn’t turn had been ineffective.

Some arguments against it, though:

She was also barefoot at the time of her death, having been using her toes to try to escape.

Oh, and she was taken back to the prison after her death and buried by Rick and the group.

And, yes, she was still wearing at least half of the handcuffs after being freed, per the image at left (although it’s on the OTHER hand from the one seen in the image above).

It’s quite a stretch. We didn’t see the burial, so it’s as likely that they burned her body. She was left in the room with Michonne when she shot herself, and it’s almost impossible to imagine that Michonne would let her dearest friend turn rather than finishing her off with the katana if the aim wasn’t true. Woodbury wasn’t that close to the prison, and it’s unlikely that they would have put Andrea in the ground instantly after returning from the harrowing trip out, so for the timeline to work, Andrea would have had to take a really long time to turn. 

In any event, it’s a theory. A very unlikely one, but one that keeps coming up online. The camera seemingly lingered on the handcuffs for a moment, which some feel bolsters their claim, but others note that it could just as likely be a seed for future storytelling — another place where characters might be chained up, or even just a character we could see in the spinoff, a webisode, whatever. Any or all of those is more likely than it being Andrea considering all the evidence against.

If the showrunners even made the Andrea connection, the two most likely scenarios, it seems, are that they used a shirt recognizable as Andrea’s and someone decided to toss the cuff on to see if anyone noticed (they always do, after all)…or that this is a case of Andrea having a “twin,” like the one Michonne saw of herself late in Season Four when she was traveling alone and had a breakdown, cutting a small herd of walkers to bit in response.

On top of everything else, there’s this: when Shane and Lori have come back, even for brief shots, fantasy sequences, flashbacks, and the like, the producers of The Walking Dead have brought back the original actors to reprise the roles. When a fan asked actress Laurie Holden about the “Andrea Walker,” here’s what she had to say:

The Walking Dead airs Sundays at 9 p.m. ET/PT on AMC. If showrunners comment on this theory, we’ll update the story.