The Walking Dead Debuts New Logo in Extended Season 10 Premiere

The Walking Dead decays in the newest logo opening Sunday's extended Season 10 premiere, "Home Sweet Home." From Seasons 1 through 8, the degradation of the opening credits resembled the flesh-eating walkers rotting in a world overrun by the dead. In Season 9, the first under showrunner Angela Kang, a renewed logo flourishing with life reflected the hopeful new beginning ushered in by Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) and his group of survivors 18 months after an end to the war with Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). In the extended tenth season, now set a decade into the zombie apocalypse, an updated logo for The Walking Dead decomposes in the aftermath of the bloody Whisperer War.

This isn't the first logo change for Season 10. The restored logo overgrown with greenery last appeared in the season opener, "Lines We Cross," and was updated with embers after the survivors banded together to extinguish a forest fire in Whisperer territory.

After Alpha (Samantha Morton) and the Whisperers set fire to the Hilltop in "Morning Star," the following episode, "Walk With Us," opened with the logo in flames. This intro was in place for the remainder of the Whisperer War, appearing for the final time in October's "A Certain Doom."

In the six new bonus episodes extending Season 10, which last saw the survivors silence the Whisperers with the deaths of Alpha and Beta (Ryan Hurst), the logo is fractured and stained with blood — much like the heroes left picking up the pieces following the destruction the Whisperers left in their wake.

"These are episodes that are an extension of Season 10, but we started them after we'd already been starting work on Season 11 and the pandemic interrupted things. But there's still a lot of really great character work that we get into in these episodes," showrunner Angela Kang teased during The Walking Dead Extended Season 10 Preview Special. "We get into where Daryl and Carol are at after the emotional roller coaster that they were on in the Whisperers arc, we get to see wonderful Paola [Lázaro, who plays Princess] and the group that she's with, getting to learn a little bit more about the group that they were apprehended by at the end of Episode 16."

Kang continued, "We get to see Aaron and Gabriel on just an old-fashioned Walking Dead survival story that tells us a lot about the state of Alexandria, which is going to be really, really important for the story going forward, and then we get to dive into the Maggie and Negan dynamic, which I know a lot of people are excited to find out how those two are gonna occupy the same space. We'll also get to find out more about what Maggie has been up to, and how that affects the future in big ways, so we'll be seeing a mix of stories from people's past that affect the future as well as where everybody's at in the aftermath of this giant Whisperer War, because things are pretty screwed up and they've got a lot to do to pull themselves together."

Follow the author @CameronBonomolo on Twitter for all things TWD. New episodes of The Walking Dead extended Season 10 premiere Sundays at 9 pm ET/8c on AMC.