The Walking Dead Season 10 Easter Egg Remembers a Long-Dead Character From the First Season

The Walking Dead pours one out for a long-dead Season 1 character in the newest Season 10 bonus episode “One More.” When Aaron (Ross Marquand) and Father Gabriel (Seth Gilliam) chance upon a stash of goodies during a two-week scavenging run, they help themselves to dinner and drink: roasted boar meat and a glass of expensive whiskey. During a card game between the two men playing for bottle caps, pay close attention to the label and you’ll spot the $2,000 bottle of alcohol is named after a character who appeared in the first episode of The Walking Dead in 2010.

The bottle of “Duane Jones Bourbon” is named for Duane Jones (Adrian Kali Turner), the late son of Morgan Jones (Lennie James). The young survivor appears in only one episode, the series premiere “Days Gone Bye,” where Duane and Morgan meet Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln).

When Rick and Morgan meet again in the Season 3 episode “Clear,” we find out from a delirious Morgan that Duane died when Morgan went into a cellar in search of food. Morgan reveals he came back upstairs to see Duane with a gun raised at his zombified mother — who Morgan couldn’t bring himself to put to rest in “Days Gone Bye” — and he watched through blood-red eyes as his wife tore their son apart.

Because Season 10 takes place more than a decade into the zombie apocalypse, some viewers speculated the masked fighter who first appears in “A Certain Doom” would be revealed as a disguised Duane who survived his apparent and off-screen death. In “Home Sweet Home,” the mysterious character is unmasked as Elijah (Okea Eme-Akwari), an ally Maggie (Lauren Cohan) met during her time away on the road.

Morgan only recently worked through grief over his family’s death over on the fifth season of spin-off Fear the Walking Dead, currently set years before the events of The Walking Dead‘s tenth season. Though Duane and Jenny Jones (Keisha Tillis) are long dead, the characters were remembered when Fear addressed the mental roadblocks in the way of Morgan’s budding romance with Grace (Karen David).

“I don’t know whether he’s capable of saying goodbye to Jenny, I don’t think the goal is for him to say goodbye to Duane and Jenny,” James said in a 2019 interview about Morgan’s family. “It might be the best he can get to find a way of remembering Jenny and Duane in a way that doesn’t hurt him so much, and in a way that doesn’t hinder the possibility of a relationship with somebody else. Whether that’s Grace or not we’ll have to wait and find out.”

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; Fear the Walking Dead Season 6 returns with new episodes on April 11.