Walking Dead Keeps Lowering The Stakes Of Its Final Season

The Walking Dead is continuously lowering the stakes for its final season. Developments in the show itself, combined with spinoff announcements, are having a direct impact on season 11’s excitement factor. Since it’s the final chapter for the long-running AMC series, expectations have been set rather high for The Walking Dead season 11’s ending.

Diving up into three parts, the 24-episode season is confirmed to be the show’s swan song. Having begun in August 2021, the show is expected to wrap up by the end of 2022. Like the comic version, The Walking Dead is drawing to a close by adapting the Commonwealth arc, which provided a proper ending for the remaining main characters in the comic series. The same is likely to be the case for AMC’s take on the story, though the fate of each character could be fundamentally different. Since the show has a tendency to make significant comic changes, the source material can’t be used to accurately predict how The Walking Dead ends.

Though The Walking Dead has long had the potential to deliver an intense and dramatic conclusion to its eleven-season run, the series has already erased much of the suspense surrounding the fates of its main characters. Before season 11 even began, it was confirmed that Daryl and Carol were getting a spinoff. Now, it’s been announced that Maggie and Negan will also be getting the spinoff treatment in the form of Isle of the Dead. Due to these announcements, viewers know ahead of the finale that all four characters are safe.

Since they’re all fan favorites, each would have been a major subject of concern among fans. This is especially true for Negan since Maggie has good reasons for wanting to kill him. And while it’s always been hard to imagine the show killing off Daryl, this scenario would at least have been plausible for the final episode. However, that’s no longer the case for any of these four characters. Furthermore, Ezekiel’s chances of surviving the show are steadily improving as well. Earlier, Ezekiel was in great danger of dying from cancer, but Carol’s efforts to earn favors from Lance has opened the door for him to get the treatments he needs.

What The Walking Dead is doing with Carol, Daryl, Maggie, Negan, and Ezekiel severely limits the consequences that season 11’s final episodes can offer. Of course, it can still kill off Gabriel, Rosita, Eugene, or Aaron, but the biggest characters have already been taken off the table and are no longer candidates for a shocking death. Instead, it looks like most of the main characters will make it out of the series finale in one piece, regardless of how much the conflict with the Commonwealth escalates in the months to come.

The Walking Dead releases new episodes on Sundays on AMC.

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