The Walking Dead “Splinter” Sneak Peek Reveals a New Comic Book Character

The Walking Dead reveals a new character when a stone-faced soldier questions Princess (Paola Lazaro) in a scene from next Sunday’s “Splinter.” When we last saw them in October’s Season 10 finale, Princess and her new friends — Eugene (Josh McDermitt), King Ezekiel (Khary Payton), and Yumiko (Eleanor Matsuura) — were captured by the armored soldiers of the Commonwealth Army. In “A Certain Doom,” the foursome traveled to a rail yard in Charleston, West Virginia, to meet with Stephanie (Margot Bingham): a friendly confidant and the first voice to come over Eugene’s long-distance radio earlier in the season.

In a sneak preview that aired exclusively on Sunday’s virtual Talking Dead, Princess is anxious to learn the fate of Yumiko after she’s roughed up and hauled away by the armored soldiers. She sits in front of a rigid and unamused interviewer who gets straight to business:

The interviewer asks for her name but gets no reply. “You don’t know your name?”

“Princess,” answers the fuzzy pink-coat-wearing survivor, real name Juanita Sanchez.

“You think this is a joke?”

“Where you from?” asks the shadowy interrogator. No answer. A beat. “Where are you from?”

Princess responds with a question: “Where is she?” The interviewer counters with a question of his own: “Where were you when the fall happened?”

With a scoff, an impatient Princess answers, “Why is any of that important? Pittsburgh. Can you just tell me if she’s alive?”

In the comic books, this person is Lance Hornsby: well-dressed in fancy clothing of someone comfortable, authoritative but polite enough, formal but ready to have his soldiers fire should his questionnaire go unanswered. Lance is a bookkeeper and the welcome wagon for the first of our group who are escorted to the Commonwealth, an extremely well-off civilization of networks home to nearly 50,000 survivors.

When she returns in “Splinter,” the ADHD, PTSD, and anxiety-riddled Princess “struggles with memories of her traumatic past and tries to escape one way or another with the help of Ezekiel.”

“I think we definitely will [learn more about Princess], and I think we’ll understand a little bit more about why she uses comedy, big personality, big movements, and that swag that she has as a defense mechanism for shielding her from what’s happened in her past,” Lazaro said when teasing “Splinter” during the Walking Dead Extended Season 10 Preview Special. “So hopefully we get to see a lot more of that, and where that personality comes from, and why she has to put on that mask every day.”

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.