When The Walking Dead airs its Season 10 finale in April, the half-season ends with a cliffhanger leading into Season 11. Showrunner Angela Kang won’t give away the magnitude of the coming cliffhanger — audiences were left on the hook for months when Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) picked an unidentified victim in the Season 6 finale, while a smaller cliffhanger ended Season 9 when King Ezekiel (Khary Payton), using the long-range radio constructed by Eugene (Josh McDermitt), unknowingly made contact with an outside community as part of a storyline still unfolding in Season 10 and beyond — but there will be more unanswered questions pushing into the eleventh season now in the works.
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“I’ll just say that there’s some big stuff and there is a cliffhanger, without getting into what exactly that is,” Kang told Entertainment Weekly. “But I think hopefully it will be exciting.”
Signs point towards the Commonwealth, a network of nearly 50,000 survivors introduced in the late stages of creator Robert Kirkman’s comic book. Trailers for this half-season show Ezekiel, Eugene, and Yumiko (Eleanor Matsuura), all currently residents of the Hilltop colony, setting out on a state-crossing road trip that could bring them face-to-face with the mysterious woman acting as Eugene’s unnamed radio contact.
Kang earlier hinted at the Commonwealth following the airing of the midseason finale, “The World Before,” which ended on its own mini cliffhanger when Daryl (Norman Reedus), Carol (Melissa McBride), and other heroes found themselves trapped in a cave teeming with walkers. After months of waiting to learn who survives the cave, audiences will get their answer in the midseason premiere, “Squeeze.”
“I think there’s something freeing knowing that the end of the comic is coming. You know, luckily for this Whisperer story, we still have the comics. For Season 11, we still do have the basis in the Commonwealth story, so we haven’t run it out completely,” Kang previously told Deadline. “However, I think what’s actually been fun for us is since our array of characters now, especially like in the lead characters department, is so different from what it is in the comic book that it allows us to kind of improvise more in certain ways.”
The season-ending cliffhanger could involve the return of Maggie (Lauren Cohan), who will be reintroduced in Season 10 before Cohan rejoins as a series regular in Season 11.
The Walking Dead‘s midseason 10 premiere airs Sunday, Feb. 23 at 9/8c on AMC. For more TWD, follow the author @CameronBonomolo on Twitter.
