“The Walking Dead” season finale is fast approaching, and it looks like the final showdown in All Out War won’t go down in a setting familiar to fans — but will set the stage for new storylines.
Lead actor Andrew Lincoln said that the location where the finale was shot was “unusual” — so we’re not expecting the showdown between Rick and Negan to be at the Hilltop or the Sanctuary.
“The location we shot at was phenomenal and unusual,” he said in a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly. “I hope that it’s going to look on screen as good as it felt when we were shooting there.”
Also unusual? The storytelling. Lincoln also described the finale as a “smorgasbord” with an “unusual structure.” We may see several storylines resolve at once.
“I would say this is a smorgasbord,” he said. “I think you’ve got everything in this one. It’s quite an unusual structure, but it’s very emotional, I hope, because that’s what I felt. It’s epic.”
Lincoln’s comments echo those made by co-star Norman Reedus, who said that “There are four things that happen that could be the finale, and they all go off at once at the same time.”
“They head in different directions, and they’re all individually as good as the next, and they’re all very, very satisfying,” said Reedus, who plays Daryl Dixon. “I like that about it. I like that it’s not just one person’s story. There are probably four, maybe five, different directions that the show could’ve ended on and it went in all of them.”
Lincoln also hinted that the finale will set up storylines for Season 9.
“It does feel like it completes something,” he added. “But it also does feel that it offers a lot of interesting story arcs for the future, which is quite unusual.”
Could this mean we’ll be introduced to next season’s baddie? After all, we met Negan in the Season 6 finale. And where could this “phenomenal” showdown be taking place that Lincoln found so “unusual”?
Watch the finale on April 15 on AMC (or catch it with the “Fear the Walking Dead” premiere in theaters).