The Walking Dead: Christian Serratos on Rosita’s Finale Fate

Warning: this story contains spoilers from The Walking Dead series finale. The latest and last victim of The Walking Dead did not want to make it out of the zombie drama alive. Titled “Rest in Peace,” Sunday’s series finale sent the trio of Rosita Espinosa (Christian Serratos), Father Gabriel Stokes (Seth Gilliam), and Eugene Porter (Josh McDermitt) on a mission to reach the children’s house in the Commonwealth’s lower ward. After the Commonwealth army rerouted an invading walker herd away from Governor Pamela Milton’s (Laila Robins) gated community, Rosita, Gabriel, and Eugene rescued Rosita’s daughter and the other kidnapped children, only to find themselves swarmed by the zombie masses. 

It was during their dramatic escape that Rosita, carrying daughter Coco in her arms, appeared to be devoured by the walker horde when she fell from a pipe she was climbing to safety. But Rosita survived, seemingly unscathed, fighting off the walkers and climbing variants before leaping from an overturned ambulance and scrambling into an open window. 

Unfortunately, Rosita did not escape without a scratch — or a bite. She later revealed a walker’s bite on her shoulder, meaning there could be no limb-severing, life-saving amputation. After heart-wrenching goodbyes, Rosita eventually succumbed to the infection and passed away peacefullyas the last death on The Walking Dead.

“I didn’t want to survive the show,” Serratos said on Sunday’s Talking Dead. “I thought the show needed a really emotional ending. I thought that it made the happy ending that we had so much stronger to kind of have our hearts broken one last time.”

Serratos, who played Rosita Espinosa since Season 4 in 2014, wanted Rosita to die as she lived: for family.

“It also made sense for the character. She was so willing to die for her loved ones and the family she acquired after making sure her child was safe,” Serratos explained. “And for me, as an actor, I wanted closure. I’ve been playing this character for a very long time, and I wasn’t going to see her ever again. So I needed that closure.”

As the show went into its eleventh and final season, Serratos approached showrunner Angela Kang and executive producer Greg Nicotero about Rosita’s last story and a legacy that would live on even after The Walking Dead ended.

“Well, Christian, I remember almost a year ago, she came and sat in my office and she said, ‘Look, I really want something big for Rosita. I want something for my character to sink her teeth into,’” episode director Nicotero told ComicBook in our “Rest in Peace” postmortem. “And she had been playing around with the idea of proposing that, ‘Does she die?’ And she said, ‘I want to go out, I want it to be heroic, I want to be saving the children. I want to do something that leaves my character with a legacy.’”

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