The Walking Dead’s Heath Mystery Might Be Solved in New Spinoff

The Walking Dead hasn’t forgotten about Heath (Corey Hawkins), the Alexandrian who has been missing since the show’s seventh season. Heath disappeared during a two-week scavenging mission with Tara (Alanna Masterson) in Season 7 Episode 6, “Swear,” first aired in November 2016. While Tara discovered the all-female Oceanside community, Heath vanished almost without a trace: Tara later came across his shattered glasses, tire tracks from their now-gone RV, and a dropped key card reading “PPP.” Two years later, producers confirmed it was the Civic Republic Military — the helicopter group who abducted Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) — who are responsible for Heath’s mysterious disappearance.

The black-wearing Civic Republic Military, or CRM, were revealed to have ties to Jadis (Pollyanna McIntosh) of the Scavengers. This junkyard-dwelling group abducted and traded people for supplies as part of an as-yet unexplained classification system, where the CRM labeled people as either an “A” or a “B.”

Commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Elizabeth Kublek (Julia Ormond), the CRM returns in new spinoff The Walking Dead: World Beyond, which will declassify secrets about the people who snatched Rick and Heath. But it’s another in-development spinoff — Tales of the Walking Dead, created by former Walking Dead showrunner Scott Gimple — that could finally solve a years-old mystery.

Gimple describes Tales as an episodic anthology made up of standalone zombie stories with new and existing characters, including those who have already died. Driving the spinoff are stories “that we just couldn’t tell on any of the other shows,” Gimple said in a recent interview with The Los Angeles Times.

“There will be sprinklings of things that we are familiar with: characters that we’ve lost on the show and their past, seeing how they wound up in the situations [in which] they wound up, or the people that they wound up [as]. And there’s some interesting crossovers,” he said. “There’s a few stories that are like, ‘Oh, wow, that affected that,’ ‘That person affected that; we never knew that.’ … Places or situations that affected our characters, we see how those came to be independent of our characters; with new characters.”

Tales of the Walking Dead is the likeliest landing point for a Heath-focused episode or two revealing what happened to him; by the time of Season 10, Heath has been missing for nearly eight years in-universe.

Gimple, who served as showrunner during Season 7, promised Heath would “be within The Walking Dead again.”

“We definitely have not seen the last of Heath, period,” he said in 2017. Walking Dead creator and executive producer Robert Kirkman made a similar promise in 2018, saying during a convention appearance, “We have not forgotten Heath. And everyone will remember that character when he comes back.”

Tales of the Walking Dead is now in development at AMC, where the spinoff is currently undated. For all things TWD, follow the author @CameronBonomolo on Twitter.