Dead Man Walking?

Norman Reedus Thinks Your Walking Dead Season-Finale Rage Means It Did Its Job

“The fact that people are still talking is a huge compliment to how that episode was executed and the acting in it and the writing of it.”
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Courtesy of AMC.

Any Walking Dead fan probably has some intense thoughts about the series’s most recent season finale. Even those who don’t watch have probably heard by now that Season 6 ended on a huge cliff-hanger, after which one of the group’s core members will presumably be very, very dead—beaten to a bloody pulp, in fact.

But we’ll have to wait until the Season 7 premiere to find out who that person is. Many fans had predicted this approach, but even months later, it remains a sore spot—which is funny, because according to Norman Reedus (who plays Daryl Dixon) this outrage is a “huge compliment.”

“I’ve been making art for a long time,” Reedus told Entertainment Weekly, “and you want people to talk. Sometimes you make something just to get people to talk.”

Whether Reedus was specifically talking about the finale with that last sentence is unclear, but this approach—making something “just to get people to talk”—is precisely what fans have accused the episode of doing. Instead of trusting its audience to come back next fall, the show drummed up drama with a cliff-hanger that didn’t need to remain unresolved. Viewers spent all of Season 6 waiting for that fateful moment when the group meets Negan and he takes someone’s life. In a way, the entire season was one ongoing cliff-hanger, all leading up to a finale . . . which then decided to prolong the wait for a few more months.

But regardless of why Reedus thinks the cliff-hanger happened, he thinks ongoing discussion of it—or, you know, rage inspired by it—speaks well of the show. He also seems to think the anger has more to do with fans’ impatience than bad writing.

“The fact that people are still talking is a huge compliment to how that episode was executed and the acting in it and the writing of it,” Reedus said. “That’s a good thing. . . . I know we all have phones and everything is instant gratification now. I get it. I like that, too. I like the controversy, to be honest. For that many people to be that invested in that show and freaking out, I think it’s great.”

Well, at least someone does.

Reedus hasn’t been the only one to offer his thoughts on the cliff-hanger. Show-runner Scott Gimple himself spoke with the media on a call about it, saying that he hoped fans would see the bigger plan afoot—and come to understand how the cliff-hanger fits into that.

“I ask people to give us the benefit of the doubt that it’s all part of a plan, all part of a story,” Gimple said. “I truly hope that people see [the Season 7 premiere] and they feel it justifies the way we’ve decided to tell the story. That is the way it is in our minds. I know what [the Season 7 premiere] is and I feel that it delivers on what [the Season 6 finale] sets up.”

In his interview, Reedus said he felt sorry for Gimple and Robert Kirkman, since they take the brunt of the criticism when writing angers fans.

“That’s another level of ‘What the f—?’” Reedus said. “Those guys get hammered. Me, I can be like, ‘Oh, it’s great!’ I can kinda get away with it because I don’t write it and I don’t know everything that is going to happen, but those poor guys. They bust their ass to give you this entertainment and pour their hearts on the line and then they just get ‘What the f—, Scott Gimple? How could you do this to me!’”

We’ll see when Season 7 rolls around whether fans wisen up to the grand workings of The Walking Dead’s storytelling, or if they simply continue to send Gimple and company tweets that could be summed up by this GIF: