Why The Walking Dead Season 10 Finale Isn’t Airing Tonight

The Walking Dead Season 10 finale planned to premiere Sunday, April 12, has been postponed indefinitely amid the coronavirus crisis and will now air later this year on AMC. Showrunner Angela Kang told ComicBook.com work on the Greg Nicotero-directed finale, “A Certain Doom,” was “very close to finishing” when work could not continue on the special effects-heavy episode picking up where last Sunday’s episode 15, “The Tower,” left off. The penultimate episode of the season ended on a cliffhanger with the survivors trapped inside an abandoned hospital tower swarmed by Beta’s (Ryan Hurst) walker horde, forcing Daryl (Norman Reedus) and other heroes to enact a desperate escape plan in the season finale.

“We were very close to finishing [episode] 16,” Kang told ComicBook.com.”We usually deliver the episodes for a big effects-heavy episode about two weeks before we air. We were about a week and a half out at the point which California shut down.”

Scripting work on Season 11 is continuing remotely, but a shooting start on the new season was pushed back by up to a month on March 13.

“What is continuing remotely is the effects that can be finished, but even after all of that’s done, all the shots need to be laid in,” Kang explained. “There’s a color process that needs machines to be finished. There’s sound work that we usually do on the Warner Brothers stage, and that’s very complex mixing equipment that you can’t just move into somebody’s house overnight. And multiple people work on that.”

Kang stressed the finale is “very, very close to finishing” and will be completed once it is safe for crew to return to work.

“I think actually, by the time the world is safe for people to start venturing out, probably all of the effects will be done, and then it’s just a handful of processes and it can be turned around very, very quickly,” Kang said. “We’re very hopeful that we can get it all done very rapidly once we’re back up and running.”

When the finale airs as a special episode later this year, “A Certain Doom” opens with Maggie (Lauren Cohan) returning to The Walking Dead after many months away. Audiences will also learn more about the mysterious person whose identity is hidden by an iron mask, and will find out what happens when Eugene (Josh McDermitt), Yumiko (Eleanor Matsuura), King Ezekiel (Khary Payton) and newcomer Princess (Paola Lazaro) continue their fateful trip towards meeting a new community.

“When we continue … Maggie’s back and she now knows what’s happened to everyone based on that letter she got when Carol left her a note when she was traveling up and down the coast before the first episode,” Kang said on the most recent episode of Talking Dead. “So we will find out what that means for our people. Also, our heroes have this kind of clever hideout away from the communities, but they’ve been discovered, so that puts them on a collision course with the Whisperer horde, which they’ve been trying to avoid tangling with too much.”

Viewers can also anticipate at least one major death when the season comes to an end later this year.

A new date for “A Certain Doom” has not been set. For all things TWD, follow the author @CameronBonomolo on Twitter.