The Walking Dead: Maggie Returns With New Characters in Season 10C Premiere

The Walking Dead reveals a first look at one of the new characters cast for the extended Season 10 bonus episodes premiering in February, where Maggie Rhee (Lauren Cohan) returns home after years away. When she reunites with old friends in October’s “A Certain Doom,” returning just in time to save Father Gabriel (Seth Gilliam) in the climax of the Whisperer War, Maggie is with masked fighter Elijah (later cast as Cobra Kai‘s Okea Eme-Akwari). In the Season 10C premiere, “Home Sweet Home,” viewers are going to meet more of the new allies Maggie made during her years on the road:

In the first episode of the extended Season 10, Daryl (Norman Reedus) and Kelly (Angel Theory) join Maggie on a high-stakes search that pits them against an unseen and unknown threat. Also on the hunt: Elijah and Cole (American Soul‘s James Devoti), the bearded character revealed in a newly-released photo from “Home Sweet Home.”

Other characters — not all of them friendly — will show themselves throughout the episode, which answers the wheres and whys of Maggie’s years-long absence.

“She will return somewhat a new character, which is kind of cool, and all those things that affected and changed her are a story that we want to mine,” Walking Dead chief content officer Scott Gimple told ComicBook.com over the summer. “And the dynamics that she left the story in are not the dynamics that she’s coming back to. And for her especially, it’s like she took a year off of high school, and she’s coming back, and everybody has changed.”

That includes Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), who widowed Maggie when he killed Glenn (Steven Yeun) some eight years earlier. When Daryl and Maggie reunite, we learn her altruistic travels originally inspired by Georgie (Clarice‘s Jayne Atkinson) have come with new tragedies.

“All the things have scrambled and there’s Negan in a very different role,” Gimple said. “And it’s a reintroduction. She can’t just pick up where she left off and she’s carrying a story with her that, yeah, will expand things.”

Showrunner Angela Kang would later tease some of the new characters encountered in these six episodes will return in the eleventh and final season due out later this year.

“She has seen some dark things on the road, and obviously, like when she comes in, she’s with this man in like a metal mask, and who is this fellow, what adventures have they been on? That’s all part of the story going forward, and it’s going to drive one of the major missions that we’ll start to see unfold,” Kang said in an October interview. “It will lead us to meet some other interesting characters that will cross into some of the other major storylines of our series going forward.”

Follow the author @CameronBonomolo on Twitter for all things TWD. The Walking Dead returns to AMC with new episodes on Sunday, February 28.