A previously released trailer for the second half of The Walking Dead Season 10 hints the remainder of the season involves more espionage, possibly revealing the true allegiance of Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). Season 10B will also reveal the unidentified accomplice who set Negan loose from the Alexandria jail, a break that resulted in Negan entering Whisperer territory and pledging his loyalty to Alpha (Samantha Morton). Suspects so far include Whisperer spy Dante (Juan Javier Cardenas) — since violently eliminated by Father Gabriel (Seth Gilliam) as result of Negan’s actions — Carol (Melissa McBride), who has sworn a vendetta against the Whisperer leader, and Daryl (Norman Reedus), who may be the prime suspect.
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The trailer — first premiered on television following the Season 10 midseason finale in December, but only recently uploaded to the official Walking Dead YouTube channel — is titled “Spies,” indicating there are moles on both sides of the survivor-Whisperer conflict.
Dante was sent by Alpha to infiltrate Alexandria, resulting in the murder of Siddiq (Avi Nash), and the survivors have an insider of their own in the disillusioned Gamma-slash-Mary (Thora Birch), who betrayed Alpha when she supplied Aaron (Ross Marquand) with the location of Alpha’s walker horde.
Mary’s intel resulted in a search team falling victim to a trap sprung by Alpha, but Mary can be seen in the Season 10B trailer alerting Alexandria of the missing group’s peril — just as Negan appears to sell out the spy embedded within the Whisperer camp.
The trailer appears to show Negan selling out Mary, but this could be misdirection: if Negan outs himself as a Whisperer spy to gain Alpha’s trust, it would allow him to carry out his own secret plans as he did in the comic books.
“There’s a whole theme of paranoia this year, because you don’t know who’s who,” Reedus said when previewing Season 10 at San Diego Comic-Con in July. “It’s starting to cause a rift within the groups in who you can trust, there’s spies, it’s a whole creepy way of doing things this year.”
There may be more unrevealed spies embedded in the other communities beyond confirmed double agents Dante and Mary, with suspicions pointing to a second Whisperer infiltrator hiding in plain sight at Oceanside. It’s all part of what showrunner Angela Kang has described as a Cold War feel for the season:
“Obviously, we have Negan embedded with the Whisperers, so we’ll continue to kind of tell the story that’s involved there,” Kang previously told EW of the season’s second half. “And then, not necessarily specific to the episode back, but just as a whole, at this point now some lines have been crossed, right? The border has been crossed by both sides. There have been these acts of war and so things are now escalating very, very fast. And we kind of get to the big conflict between the Whisperers and our people.”
She continued, “It’s going to come to a head in the back half and we’ll see how that plays out. And hopefully, there are some interesting twists and turns and surprises along the way.”
TWD Season 10 returns with new episodes Feb. 23 on AMC. For more TWD intel, follow the author @CameronBonomolo on Twitter.
