The Walking Dead Showrunner Teases Those White-Armored Soldiers Ahead of Bigger Story in Season 11

The Walking Dead showrunner Angela Kang teases the “formidable” faces suited up in white armor at the end of the original Season 10 finale, “A Certain Doom.” October’s episode ended with Eugene (Josh McDermitt), King Ezekiel (Khary Payton), Yumiko (Eleanor Matsuura), and Princess (Paola Lázaro) apprehended by armored soldiers at the rail yard where they were due to rendezvous with Stephanie (Margot Bingham) in Charleston, West Virginia. In the upcoming “Splinter,” one of the six new bonus episodes extending Season 10, we’ll learn what happens to the group after their capture in the cliffhanger that ended the season with a set up for an on-the-road Season 11.

“The one episode that’s coming up, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s a whole big story to be played,” Kang said during The Walking Dead Extended Season 10 Preview Special. “There’s more characters within that group to meet, but we will start to get into them a bit, get a sense of their vibe, what they’re about, through our characters’ perspective. But there’s so much more cool story to come in Season 11.”

Comic book readers will recognize the Star Wars-looking soldiers as members of the Commonwealth Army, the military force that defends the sprawling civilization home to Stephanie and thousands of other survivors.

“Here’s this group, they show up, they’re wearing this white armor which is not super practical, but also they had to create these uniforms. It’s really cool in a comic when you’ve got this look, but it’s like, ‘What does it mean about this group that they’re part of?’” Kang teased. “They had to have some ability to create these things and keep them clean and make them all look the same, but they’re also ingenious because they’ve got these sort of like automatic weapons that they’ve also transformed with a bayonet, so it’s the old and the new all mixed together.”

Kang added, “It tells you that this group is really formidable, they are organized, they have some access to the materials that you need to create in a uniform fashion, so that’s really unlike some of the groups that we’ve seen. Because our groups have only been able to do things like that on a very limited basis, like [how] Eugene was only able to make a handful of perfect bullets. But these guys have a lot more going on.”

In “Splinter,” premiering March 21, Princess struggles with memories of her traumatic past and tries to escape with Ezekiel’s help.

Season 10 of The Walking Dead returns with six all-new bonus episodes Sunday, February 28, on AMC. Follow the author @CameronBonomolo on Twitter for all things TWD.