Who was that masked man, anyway? In The Walking Dead’s Season 10 finale, “A Certain Doom,” the survivors trapped by Beta’s (Ryan Hurst) zombie horde get a helping hand when Maggie (Lauren Cohan) returns just in time, accompanied by a metal-masked mystery man wielding kama weapons. The hooded stranger fights off Whisperers when rescuing Aaron (Ross Marquand) and Alden (Callan McAuliffe), and slices his way through another pack of Whisperers by sparing Father Gabriel (Seth Gilliam) from certain doom. “He’s with me,” Maggie says, without giving a name to the stranger who doesn’t remove his armor even after the war with the Whisperers has ended.
Videos by ComicBook.com
Maggie’s unnamed companion does not have a counterpart in the comic book. One-shot spinoff comic The Walking Dead: The Alien did involve a female character who navigated the early days of the zombie apocalypse in plate armor resembling a medieval knight, but she only appeared once and never in the main Walking Dead comic.
The Walking Dead won’t unmask this new ally until the six new episodes extending Season 10 into early next year. Cohan is back in Georgia for filming on the anthology-style mini-season that leads into the 24-episode Season 11 due out in late 2021.
“We’re gonna deal with some of the aftermath of this Whisperer War, and obviously Maggie is back and she has this mysterious companion in a metal mask. Who is that, and what does that mean, and where do they come from? We kind of start the story from there and keep going,” showrunner Angela Kang said of these new episodes during the Walking Dead Universe Preview Special.
The episodes are designed to be filmed safely during the COVID-19 pandemic and have “sort of an anthological feel” to them.
“They’re really deep dives into our characters, which I hope people enjoy,” Kang said. “We’ve been enjoying working on something that is a little bit different from what we were doing in the main part of Season 10, and we just get to feature different people and tell these little stories that all kind of add up to a picture of what our survivors are going through, and that will lead us into Season 11 eventually.”
The Walking Dead Extended Season 10 episodes air on AMC in early 2021. For all things from The Walking Dead Universe, follow the author @CameronBonomolo on Twitter.