The Walking Dead Season 10 Gets Supersized; October Premiere Date Set for Coronavirus-Delayed 'Finale'

Charlie Mason
·2 min read

There is now a date for the end of the world, at least as The Walking Dead’s Beta sees it. At the AMC drama’s Comic-Con @ Home panel Friday, Talking Dead host Chris Hardwick announced that Season 10’s finale, “A Certain Doom,” delayed when these trying quarantimes initially prevented the completion of postproduction, will air on Sunday, Oct. 4, at 9/8c. What’s more, it will be immediately followed that night by the postponed premiere of the series’ second spinoff, The Walking Dead: World Beyond and a new episode of Talking Dead.

But those announcements, which came with an extended version of the episode’s opening minutes — now with more Beta and therefore more cray-cray — were but the tip of the iceberg. Showrunner Angela Kang also revealed that Season 10 was being extended by six episodes, to air in early 2021 “if all goes well.”

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What does that mean for Season 11? Sadly — and obviously — what it means is that Season 11 won’t be able to premiere in October, as The Walking Dead seasons always do.

Viewers will recall that in Season 10’s penultimate episode — well, back when it was the penultimate — Alpha’s right-hand man had led his horde of guardians right to the doorstep of our heroes’ hideout. But help, we learned in a preview for the finale-that’s-no-longer-a-finale, was on the way, in the form of Kevin Carroll’s Virgil, who’d apparently decided not to stay on his private island tending to the graves of his family, and the returning Lauren Cohan as Maggie.

Toward the tail end of the panel, the Dead-verse’s Chief Content Officer Scott M. Gimple was asked, if he could create a pre-apocalyptic spinoff for any character, who would it be? In answering Glenn, since he missed Steven Yeun, he admitted that, in fact, “we’re looking at things where we can take a peek at past characters” — not necessarily pre-apocalypse but at least early on in the apocalypse. Kang also confirmed what we already knew, thanks to Robert Kirkman’s comic books — that the Commonwealth is coming.

To check out the extended opening from the “finale” — could that be more walkers than we’ve ever seen at once? — press PLAY on the video above. Then hit the comments with your thoughts on an extended Season 10.

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