The Walking Dead‘s season 10C is just around the corner and will begin a bumper year for the franchise. COVID-19 delays meant that the next run – the final chapter of the core show – is only filming now and will air later this year. But on Sunday, AMC brings us season 10C, which boasts six new episodes designed to offer up new facets of familiar characters.
Personally, I’m most excited for “Here’s Negan,” which loosely adapts Robert Kirkman’s standalone comic of the same name. It showed us Negan as the Walker plague starts, a disaster that coincides with his wife dying of cancer. He can’t bring himself to kill her, though, becoming consumed with rage and remorse, a process that makes him into the intimidating and ruthless figure we know and love.
The TV adaptation follows that basic plot, but in this version, the couple will survive some time into the apocalypse. We’ll get to see Jeffrey Dean Morgan starring alongside his real-life wife Hilarie Burton Morgan as Lucille, with clips showing them hiding out in a bunker with DVDs, a generator and drugs for Lucille’s cancer. Her story obviously isn’t going to have a happy ending, but how we get there remains a mystery.
Recently, showrunner Angela Kang and Chief Content Officer Scott Gimple discussed the episode, with the former saying:
“I’m really excited for the fans to see this episode in general. [Walking Dead creator Robert] Kirkman wrote this great little ‘Here’s Negan’ side comic, and we all just loved it on the writing side. We’ve always wanted to do it, have not found the right place for it yet, so we’re really excited to tell this story of Negan before the apocalypse and in the early days of it. We cast his real-life wife Hilarie Burton to play Lucille, and she’s just perfect for the role. They are so great together, so I’m so excited for people to see these two together, and their beautiful chemistry, the way that they interact off each other. [It] really gives you this different window into the person that Negan was, and I think that’s going to be really interesting for people regardless of whether or not they know the comic story because this is our show-specific take on ‘Here’s Negan.'”
Gimple hyped up the mini-season as well, but reserved particular praise for this outing, stating:
“Angela, the staff, some writers from the past, from Walking Dead past, some people who came back to actually work on them. Everybody just gave it their all. And like Fear the Walking Dead, they’re concentrated stories because they’re shot in a way where we only have a couple of characters that we’re focusing on. I just love those kind of stories. It’s weird, for all of the intensity and fire that was under everyone to turn out as well, they’re amazing in that ‘Here’s Negan’ is an incredible episode. It’s really strange, the circumstances, how this all came together, but these six episodes are gonna be something that I think people are gonna really, really enjoy.”
I’ve got a good feeling about Season 10C. There’s often a lot of pressure in big budget TV shows to keep the narrative moving forward, so slowing down and doing some smaller scale character pieces will give both the actors and writers time to shine. As they say, adversity breeds excellence!
Season 10C of The Walking Dead begins airing on AMC on February 28th, with “Here’s Negan” scheduled for April 4th.
