The Walking Dead claimed a slew of characters in Sunday night’s penultimate episode of Season Nine. The show saw an iconic and brutal moment from Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead comics realized in live-action, though some major changes were made to the adapted version. The Whisperers and Alpha took and killed several members of the Alexandria, Kingdom, and Hilltop communities…
Major spoilers for The Walking Dead Episode 9×15 follow. Major spoilers!
Videos by ComicBook.com
After capturing Daryl, Michonne, Carol, and Yumiko, Alpha took Daryl out over a valley to show her that she is not making empty threats. She has a massive horde of walkers and Whisperers ready to defend or attack as she sees fits. After showing Daryl how massive her army is, she sent him off to see a marker of her territory, vaguely promising that he will know what she is talking about. Daryl and his group saw exactly what she was talking about on the northern border of the Whisperer land.
Alpha marked her group’s territory with a set of 10 pikes, each of which had the head of known character placed on top of it.
The 10 characters Alpha and the Whisperers killed for this pike sequence were Henry, Tara, Enid, Ozzy, DJ, Addy, Tammy, Frankie, Alec, and Rodney.
This is a major change from the pages of The Walking Dead comics. In the books, the biggest names on the pikes were Rosita and Ezekiel. Furthermore, Rosita was pregnant at the time of her death in the books. However, the show elected to change the story from the source material in favor of preserving their lives.
This is unlike the last major comic book death, which was Glenn Rhee. The show saw Negan carrying out his brutal murder of Glenn from issue #100 of the comics in the unforgettable and infamous Season Seven premiere. At that time, the show threw a curveball at viewers by adding Abraham Ford to the sequence, allowing there to be not one, but two major deaths.
In the comics, a dozen characters were killed in the pike sequence, but the only character killed in both the live-action and comic book versions of The Walking Dead in the moment was Tammy. For a complete breakdown of how the pike sequence went down in the comics, check out ComicBook.com’s breakdown from Cameron Bonomolo.
The Walking Dead airs Sundays at 9 pm ET. Fear the Walking Dead will return for its fifth season in 2019. For complete coverage and insider info all year long, follow @BrandonDavisBD on Twitter and watch ComicBook.com’s After The Dead each Sunday night following new episodes on Facebook.com/ComicBookNOW.