In its final episode of the year, The Walking Dead fully introduced the villains that will shape the back half of its ninth season.
Famous comic book antagonists The Whisperers have finally been inducted into the show after years of debate and their arrival could be the show's most creepy yet – but who are they?
Warning: spoilers below
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Essentially, the Whisperers are humans who prowl the landscape dressed in walker skin in order to catch their victims unawares. This would explain the latest episode’s final scene, which saw Jesus slain while in combat with what he believed to be a herd of the undead. Instead, Aaron, Daryl, Eugene, Michonne and Alpha watched on in horror as a walker ducked, grabbed his sword and murdered the long-haired warrior in cold blood.
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“You are where you don’t belong,” his murderer whispers as Jesus – real name Paul Rovia – slumps to the floor. Moments later, Daryl avenges his death and realises the body is a human wearing a stitched-up walker mask.
Just two weeks ago, Rosita and Eugene came across the same herd and discovered they could seemingly speak actual words.
Keen-eyed viewers think they noticed a hint of their arrival in the season eight finale, which aired earlier this year. As Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) led his group to their final showdown with Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), a huge group of the undead could be seen in the distance beyond a series of poles which, to the uninitiated, seemed like nothing at all.
In Robert Kirkman’s comic book series the show is based on, poles similar to these are used as a territory-marking device by The Whisperers, a group led by a character named Alpha.
Alpha – whose path collides with the newly-freed Negan in a very big way – utilises these poles by placing the heads of any character who gets in her way, including some still alive on the show right now, atop the spikes as a warning to others.
Hints that the Whisperers have existed in the Walking Dead universe can be dated back to season three in a scene that saw Morgan (Lennie James) claim to have seen “people wearing dead people’s faces.”
Alpha will be played in the series by Minority Report star Samantha Morton with her secondary, Beta, played by Ryan Hurst (Sons of Anarchy).
The Walking Dead continues in the US on AMC in February with the simulcast airing in the UK at 2am. The episode is also available to watch on NOW TV ahead of its repeat on FOX at 9pm the following evening.
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This post contains spoilers for The Walking Dead Season 9, Episode 5, “What Comes After.”
Sunday’s Walking Dead was a fateful one—not only for Rick Grimes, whose disappointing fake-out death set up a slate of spin-off films for Andrew Lincoln, but also for Maggie Rhee, who apparently said her last farewell on the series as well. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Sunday night was not only Lincoln’s final episode on the flagship series, but Lauren Cohan’s as well—at least for now.
Right now, T.H.R. reports, Cohan has no future episodes planned with the series, although her fate remains open-ended. Both show-runner Angela Kang and AMC Programming President David Madden confirmed the news to T.H.R.—although both indicated that they’d love to see more of Maggie Rhee in the future. “We’ve been talking to Lauren and hopefully we’ll get to tell more story for her,” Kang told T.H.R. “We definitely have some things up our sleeve that we’d love to do. A lot of that is just a scheduling conversation, so hopefully that will all work out, because I think mutually we would like to continue with Maggie’s story, for sure.” It seems fair to guess that how soon future Maggie episodes might happen rests largely on the fate of Cohan’s ABC pilot, Whiskey Cavalier.
Cohan’s official—if possibly temporary—exit from the series was announced this spring. The actress first put herself up for pilot season when her contract negotiations with AMC stalled. (Cohan had requested a large pay raise—although it was made clear she was not seeking parity with male leads Lincoln and Norman Reedus.)
This season did introduce one final fate for Maggie: joining the traveling survivor Georgie and her group on the road to share knowledge and windmill blueprints. As made clear in an earlier episode, Georgie quite likes Maggie, and has been trying to recruit her. And as sudden as Maggie’s departure might feel, Sunday night did at least provide her closure when she finally confronted Negan. Maggie’s hatred for Negan has been festering ever since she found out that the man who murdered her husband right in front of her would not die, but instead serve a life sentence in Alexandria’s newly constructed prison. On Sunday, Maggie traveled to the town to murder Negan—but once she got into his jail cell, she realized that his life sentence was more punishing than death ever could be. The scene mirrored a similar one in the Walking Dead comics—albeit one that happens later in the source material’s timeline than where we currently are in the series. Either way, it seems Maggie ended her run on The Walking Dead, at least for now, with some closure.
As for Maggie and Cohan’s future involvement in the Walking Dead universe? As Madden put it to T.H.R., “Angela and Lauren talk. They are actually friendly. And we would like to see her come back. A lot of that is going [to] have to do with Whiskey Cavalier [which premieres midseason on ABC] and what her availability then becomes, which we obviously don’t control. But creatively, we would love to see her return to some degree.” Perhaps she, like Lincoln, can appear in a Walking Dead film or two. For now, though, it appears it’s time to say goodbye.
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