The Walking Dead’s Penultimate Episode Ends on Major Cliffhanger

Warning: this story contains spoilers for Sunday’s “Family” episode of The Walking Dead. The penultimate episode of The Walking Dead concluded with the cliffhanger to end all cliffhangers, leaving fans to question who won’t make it out of the Nov. 20th series finale alive. In Sunday night’s “Family,” the Alexandrians and the exiled prisoners of Outpost 22 infiltrated the Commonwealth to take out Governor Pamela Milton (Laila Robins), who called in a “B-17”: a command ordering the military to shepherd a walker herd towards the city and force it into lockdown. But the army lost control over the swarm as it descended on the Commonwealth, trapping the survivors between armies living and dead.

In the final minutes of “Family,” Governor Milton caught onto the coup and ordered General Mercer (Michael James Shaw) arrested for treason as he tried to warn the swarm of wall-climbing variant walkers would overrun the city. Commonwealth soldiers then ambushed the Alexandrians, opening fire on Daryl (Norman Reedus), Carol (Melissa McBride), Maggie (Lauren Cohan), and Negan’s (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) group of survivors.

Judith Grimes (Cailey Fleming) was accidentally gunned down by Governor Milton, who then ordered Col. Vickers (Monique Grant) to divert the swarm toward the lower wards — home to the Commonwealth’s poor — and away from the wealthy estates. It would be a death sentence for thousands of Commonwealth citizens.

As the dead flooded inside the walls of the Commonwealth, and Governor Milton’s army sealed off the city’s streets, the survivors encountered dead end after dead end as they fought together to clear a path to get Judith to the clinic for life-saving medical care. The episode ended with Daryl carrying the wounded Judith down an alleyway as Carol, Maggie, Negan, and the rest of the survivors were swallowed up by the walker herd.

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“Really this episode is all about the final intensities, the final emotional business. The final obstacles that might swallow up our people,” AMC’s Walking Dead Universe chief content officer Scott Gimple told Deadline. “You know, the eight at the end of this episode are as deeply in the soup as they’ve been in a very, very difficult and different situation but in some ways literal.”

Gimple continued: “This is it. With those echoes of the past and the current devastating situation that they’re in, how does that all come together, implode, explode? How do they stand in solidarity or get taken down together? That is setting up this conclusion for The Walking Dead, which in true Walking Dead style is in many ways devastating.”

Read on to learn all the ways to watch The Walking Dead series finale, “Rest in Peace,” airing November 20th on AMC and AMC+. Follow @CameronBonomolo and @NewsOfTheDead on Twitter for TWD Universe coverage all season long.