‘The Walking Dead’ Showrunner Addresses Reason Behind Weird Al Song

In the earliest moments of The Walking Dead‘s season 8 premiere (also the series’ 100th episode), shots of a cane resting against a wall, flowers, a stopped watch and finally, a different-looking Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) stirring awake, are accompanied by “Another One Rides the Bus,” Weird Al Yankovic‘s parody of Queen’s iconic “Another One Bites the Dust.” The song continues to play as future Rick steps into his living room, where we see a happy Grimes family: including a warm Michonne (Danai Gurira) and a Judith who is a few years older.

In a new interview with Entertainment Weekly, showrunner Scott M. Gimple acknowledges the fact that audiences may have found it weird — and that’s why the song was picked.

“Storywise, it had to be a song that I wanted Judith to be into, but I didn’t want her to be into something necessarily typical,” Gimple said. “I wanted to have it be distinctive. I will say there is a toddler in my life sort of obsessed with that song so that might have played into it a little bit. I try to check myself in those moments where I’m doing that for friends or whatever, but I put it in the script and was sitting there thinking about it.”

Gimple said he has an aversion to “cool,” adding that with the parody musician, “there’s no worry about cool.”

“I wanted it to be rather jarring,” Gimple noted. “I mean, as jarring as what we’re seeing. Funny enough, the more I thought about it, seeing Rick with his giant beard and a limp in this other universe in Alexandria — ‘Another One Rides the Bus’ on The Walking Dead, it’s slightly more jarring than that. So, to me, it was like, oh, well, that wins. That’s exactly right. Initially, I thought it was my own bias and I shouldn’t do this, and then I was like, ‘Wait, no. It isn’t cool and the audience is going to be like, ‘What the hell is this?” And I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is exactly what we want. This is perfect.’ I was so thrilled.”

The “future timeline” was just one of four timelines expressed in The Walking Dead‘s 100th episode, and is notable for being the first time the series has peeked into the future with a flash forward. The “future scenes” were sprinkled throughout the season 8 opener, but all the answers won’t come right away: as told by Gimple last month, the jumps into the future aren’t “a one-time thing.”

“I will say that we won’t know exactly what that’s about after the first episode,” Gimple said. “But we will know it about halfway through the season. We won’t quite know what it’s about, and then we’ll get an answer to that about halfway through. It’s something that’s going to play out.”

The Walking Dead airs Sundays at 9/8c on AMC.