The Walking Dead: Behind-The-Scenes Of Carl's Big No Way Out Scene

02/15/2016 02:21 pm EST

The midseason premiere of The Walking Dead's sixth season was one for the ages. Be warned, spoilers for the ninth episode of The Walking Dead's sixth season follow.

No Way Out followed the comic books almost word for word. With slight alterations, the episode was a tribute to dedicated fans of Robert Kirkman's comic book series.

"We wanted to follow the graphic novel in terms of the extent of the injury because in the comics," The Walking Dead executive producer and VFX guru Greg Nicotero tells THR. "Carl's wound is very important in terms of how he moves forward."

"We did a head cast of Chandler and sculpted a dummy head of him with the wound incorporated into it," he explains. "We used the graphic novel as reference but if you look at the wound in the comic (at top), he would never survive that bullet hole. So we had to make sure it was something we believed Carl would be able to survive the impact of. It was as if the bullet hit that part of the skull that's just above the cheekbone and ricocheted outward and sent bone fragments into his eye. When Rick picks up Carl and runs through the horde of zombies and into the infirmary, that was all with the dummy. That wasn't Chandler."

"They molded our arms so they could chop off a hand in the actual shot. Then they molded my face so they could make a mannequin," Riggs explains of the process. "That was a really weird process because your face is encased in this stuff and you can't move at all and you can breathe but you can't see. When they shot it, I didn't have anything on my eye. I had some blood around my eye and they didn't actually have any makeup on my eye until Rick was carrying Carl inside the infirmary."

"When he was running through the field, that was the mannequin," Riggs says with a laugh. "It was only a prosthetic over my eye when Rick was bringing Carl into infirmary. It was a prosthetic that took 30 minutes to apply and dress. It was a lot of fun for me but not for anyone else, I think!"

The crew not only made a full-body dummy of Carl Grimes which Andrew Lincoln carried through Alexandria but also molded the arms of Carl and Jessie. On set, the mold was used for Andrew Lincoln to slice through to portray the scene where he frees his son from a dying Jessie's grip.

Check out some photos of how Carl's eye getting shot out for The Walking Dead's midseason premiere was brought to the TV screen in the gallery below.

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