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The Walking Dead is a force to be reckoned with.
Each year, the show returns stronger than it did before. It continually creates compelling story arc’s and continues to break all kinds of audience records.Particularly show opening records.
The Walking Dead Season 7 will be no different.
When the show returns this fall, it will smash any known opening season record and set a new record that will be extremely difficult to equal.
It was an absolute genius marketing tactic by The Walking Dead writers and showrunner. The way Season 6 ended lends itself to a perfect propaganda campaign.
If you’ve been living under a rock for the last couple of months, it breaks down like this: there’s a new villain in town.
His name is Negan and he’s a bad mofo. He has a special barbed wire-covered baseball bat he likes to call Lucille and the end of The Walking Dead Season 6 shows him deciding which one of the main characters he’s going to beat to death with it.
Lovely stuff.
And it gets better: to reduce the chance of spoilers, the show filmed Negan choosing and killing each of the cast members.
But speculation is rife and fans are already clamoring to make sure overwhelming fan-favorite Darryl is not the one who will be killed.
But judging by last night’s teaser clip, they may be shit out of luck.
Last night, another The Walking Dead teaser clip aired on AMC and proved to be another superb marketing tactic by the network.
It depicted Negan’s right-hand man, Dwight, carefully traversing a highway, wearing Darryl’s Jacket AND riding his chopper.
It’s on Youtube, you can catch it below:
The clip has caused Walking Dead fans, or more specifically Darryl fans, to have a goddamned heart attack. It doesn’t help them that the actor behind The Walking Dead’s Darryl, Norman Reedus, has refused to comment on the situation. But Reedus is social media savvy and knows the score. It’s just another piece to puzzle in the AMC marketing masterpiece.
It of course means that Darryl won’t die.
They’re pushing Darryl’s alleged death a little too hard and they’re doing it on purpose. I suspect the drawing point of the Season 7 opener is no longer for fans to finally find out who Negan killed, but to make damn sure Negan didn’t kill Darryl.
I know The Walking Dead have killed off lead characters in the past, but Darryl surely is on the “won’t die ever list” along side Rick.
He’s a fan favorite, hell, he’s THE fan favorite. Killing him off may send the fans over the edge and be a severe detriment to the show; I suspect there would even be a significant drop in audience.
So why does Dwight have Darryl’s stuff? In the comic books, after Negan killed someone in much the same manner he demanded food and medical supplies as tribute.
Maybe the same thing happens in the TV show and Dwight ends up with Darryl’s stuff?
It would be a brilliant plot device; Darryl getting his stuff back will be as entertaining as hell to watch, wouldn’t you agree?
I think it’ll be Glenn and here’s why.
I think it’s common knowledge at this point for every comic book reader or show watcher, but it’s worth re-iterating again here: in the comic books, it’s Glenn who Negan kills.
Is this a too obvious choice? Perhaps. We all know the show purposefully diverges away from the comic books in a number of places – especially with character deaths. However, if the writers are now banking on viewers expecting the show to be different from the comic books, this could also make it a fantastic choice.
However, when Glenn nearly bought it last season fans went absolutely crazy. Glenn managed to survive by the skin of his teeth, but the whole affair was instant ratings for the show. Doing it again, but for real this time could be the last thing most fans would expect.
Plus if it is Glenn, AMC have a major character death which they already know is guaranteed to pull on the heartstrings of the audience.
But at this point, this is just thought out speculation. Nothing is guaranteed (expect that it definitely won’t be Darryl or Rick) until the new season airs.
We’ll just have to see who in the hell buys it when The Walking Dead Season 7 airs on 23rd October.
Let me know via Twitter or Facebook
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