The Walking Dead Star Teases That Shock Cliffhanger (Exclusive)

Warning: this story contains spoilers for Sunday’s “No Other Way” episode of The Walking Dead. “It doesn’t have to be this way,” Maggie (Lauren Cohan) told Daryl (Norman Reedus) in a post-six month time skip standoff outside the Hilltop to end Sunday’s Season 11 return of The Walking Dead. “Yeah,” said Daryl, dressed in the white armor of a Commonwealth trooper, “yeah, it does.” ComicBook asked Lauren Cohan about what looks to be Maggie versus Daryl and Hilltop versus the Commonwealth, the advanced community that has welcomed most of our survivors in a merger with Alexandria.

“There’s not too much I can say, but I think that there’s a lot that comes up for her to do with this, ‘Will we, won’t we play ball with the Commonwealth?’ It’s difficult to rebuild to begin with, and it’s really difficult to rebuild when you don’t have any food or resources,” Cohan said in an exclusive postmortem, teasing “a lot of challenges” for the Hilltoppers rebuilding the community burnt down during the Whisperer War. 

“The group and Maggie and the people at Hilltop are definitely gonna be hit with a lot of challenges, as far as that,” Cohan said. “And we, as an audience, we’re gonna really get to try to peek under the hood of this Commonwealth, which Maggie obviously finds very suspicious.” 

“No Other Way” ends with a sudden six-month flash-forward revealing Maggie’s return to Hilltop, rejecting Eugene (Josh McDermitt) and Lance Hornsby’s (Josh Hamilton) invitation to join the Commonwealth. The civilization governed by Pamela Milton (Laila Robins) is the potentially temporary home of Daryl and Rosita (Christian Serratos), both recruits of the Commonwealth Army under General Mercer (Michael James Shaw). 

Asked about the wall dividing Maggie and Daryl in the second part of the final season, Cohan said, “I think that there’s a dream that maybe [Commonwealth] could have something good to offer, and maybe there could be good out there and people that can help you and support you and make your life a bit easier in the apocalypse. But is that itself too good to be true?”

“I think it’s just very difficult to trust at this point in the game for many of these characters, including Maggie,” Cohan added. “So we’ll see what happens.” 

Read our full spoilers Q&A with Lauren Cohan. New episodes of The Walking Dead: The Final Season air Sundays on AMC and AMC+.

Follow the author @CameronBonomolo on Twitter and @NewsOfTheDead for TWD Universe coverage all season long.