Fear TWD’s Austin Amelio Reveals If Dwight Will Ever Return to The Walking Dead

Will Dwight return to The Walking Dead? In the original comic books, former Negan underling Dwight took on a leadership role after Alexandria chief Rick Grimes defeated and then jailed Negan to end the war against his Saviors. Dwight, commanding the allied Saviors, participated in the war against the Whisperers, ultimately proving himself as one of Rick’s most trusted allies until his tragic death. The show went another way, having its Dwight (Austin Amelio) turn mole against the Saviors only to be exiled from Virginia under threat by Daryl (Norman Reedus). A search for missing wife Sherry (Christine Evangelista) brought Dwight west to Texas, where he reconnected with a runaway Morgan (Lennie James), but will Dwight ever return to the settlements near Alexandria?

“I don’t think so,” Amelio said when at Walker Stalker Con Atlanta when asked about a return to The Walking Dead. “I think that’s long gone, unfortunately.”

Amelio boarded the spinoff in its fifth season as the second crossover between the two shows, following the addition of TWD transplant James in Season 4. Though the back half of that season teased Morgan and his new group migrating to Alexandria, Morgan instead chose to remain in Texas and have the group operate as a convoy helping needy strangers.

And now, as of the Season 5 finale, Fear is some seven years behind present action on TWD Season 10. Though many of those years went unseen — Season 9 of the mothership series underwent a six-year time skip following the presumed death of Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) — Dwight and Morgan seemingly never returned.

While some have suspected the two shows might one day merge, bringing the ensembles of both shows together, TWD chief content officer Scott Gimple has said character crossovers like Morgan and Dwight’s will be rare moving forward — suggesting we won’t see the Fear crew appear on TWD. In a recent interview with Deadline, Gimple said TWD Universe would not be leaning into crossover-heavy events, and that it would instead “investigate different parts of the universe and have them be distinct unto themselves.”

“We’re not looking to lean on crossovers so much,” Gimple said. “It’s there as an option and it’s fun but we would want to make it special. We don’t want it to be the basis of our storytelling approach. The things that we’ve implied [about the wider universe] have always been things we wanted to follow and tell more of.”

Fear showrunners Andrew Chambliss and Ian Goldberg have since teased Dwight’s search for Sherry will reach its end in Season 6, due out on AMC sometime in 2020.