Walking Dead's Melissa McBride and Norman Reedus Tease a Seismic Shift in Final Season: 'We're Like, 'Whaaat?''

To hear Norman Reedus tell it, The Walking Dead as you knew and loved it may already be as good as gone. What’s more, that may not be a bad thing.

When he and Melissa McBride recently spoke with TVLine ahead of the AMC drama’s 11th and final season premiere (Sunday, Aug. 22, at 9/8c), he said that the introduction of the Commonwealth mega-community signals a shift that’s arguably more seismic than any past one that the show has undergone. (Get your first look here.) “It’s very surreal. Every season feels like a different show in a certain sense, but this season, it’s a whole new backdrop, a whole new color palette, a whole new attitude.

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“It’s sort of in Technicolor all of a sudden,” he continued, “and it takes some getting used to, which you can see in our group [of survivors] — we’re having trouble getting used to it, too. It’s like Alice fell down the rabbit hole, and she doesn’t know where she’s at. We just stepped into a Salvador Dalí painting, so we’re like, ‘Whaaat?’”

For once, Daryl and Carol won’t have one another to lean on, either, at least not quite like they would’ve before she accidentally killed his almost-girlfriend, Connie (or so he thinks). “At the beginning, they’re still working to make amends and build trust again,” said McBride. “I think most everything they went through was understood, so it’s not really making amends so much as getting comfortable and sort of crawling back into that [rapport].

“Carol’s sort of got her tail between her legs a little bit,” she added, “but she’s like, ‘We need to work this out, and we will — over time, little by little.’”

Considering that “Caryl” already have their own spinoff announced, they’d better. What are you hoping will happen before the final season is over, Dead-heads? And fearing will happen? Hit the comments.

Launch Gallery: <i>The Walking Dead</i> Season 11 Photos

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