The Walking Dead Showrunner on Lydia’s Fate

Warning: this story contains spoilers for Sunday’s “Family” episode of The Walking Dead. Love bites, especially for Lydia (Cassady McClincy). In Sunday’s “Family,” Aaron (Ross Marquand), Jerry (Cooper Andrews), Lydia, and her new boyfriend Elijah (Okea Eme-Akwari) Whisperer their way through a walker herd with Luke (Dan Fogler) and Jules (Alex Sgambati), who may be Oceanside’s only survivors. Still rattled by their encounter with the “climber” strain of variant walkers, Aaron’s group gets caught in the herd when Governor Pamela Milton (Laila Robins) calls in a “B-17”: a false flag for the military to shepherd the swarm towards the city and put the Commonwealth on lockdown. 

A guts-wearing Aaron, Jerry, and Lydia manage to break away toward an abandoned RV, but Jules gets caught in a wall of walkers that push her through the crowd. As Luke shambles off after Jules, Elijah fails to get free from the herd and inside the RV’s opened door. Lydia holds onto Elijah to keep him from being swept away, exposing her forearm to a walker that sinks its teeth into her skin, tearing the flesh from her wrist.

Inside the RV, Aaron and Jerry are forced to amputate Lydia’s arm before the infection can spread. “I can’t lose him,” Lydia says of Elijah, dragged away by the herd. Aaron tells her, “Then he’s gonna lose you. You understand?” 

Aaron — who suffered his own accident that left him an amputee — braces Lydia for the emergency surgery. “You know what happened to me. I made it all right, yeah? This is the hardest part,” Aaron assures her. “You are so loved, Lydia. We’re gonna get you through this, okay?” 

Aaron and Jerry tie up her arm with a belt. She bites down. With a swing of his blade, Jerry severs Lydia’s arm.

“Cassady, who plays Lydia, she’s amazing. She can tap into the Lydia pain spectrum so well and so quickly,” showrunner Angela Kang said on AMC+’s TWD: Episode Insider. “So it was really moving when we saw the footage come back and she’s trying to reach for the person that she loves and hang onto him, through when she’s bitten and through when she knows that she has to have the limb severed, because she’s still thinking about somebody else in that moment.”

“She really brings so much emotion and sensitivity to that character,” Kang continued. “I think Aaron and Jerry are very parental… They’re very good at keeping people around them feeling safe when they’re in that mode. I really love the work that they did in doing a sequence like this, ’cause these are always challenging sequences, kind of from every side, I think.”

The Walking Dead series finale, “Rest in Peace,” premieres Sunday, November 20th on AMC and AMC+.

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