Did The Walking Dead Boss Just Reveal a Huge Spoiler About a Big Death?

Did Robert Kirkman just reveal a major character's death?

By Chris Harnick Feb 12, 2015 9:43 PMTags
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Nobody is safe on The Walking Dead. That is plain and simple. But was a death just spoiled on Chris Hardwick's @midnight?

Robert Kirkman, the writer behind the comic book series the AMC show is based on who also serves as a writer and executive producer on the TV series, visited the Comedy Central series and was asked for fake spoilers. The producers and stars of the show are notoriously tight-lipped, which is why the audience was shocked when Kirkman described Glenn's (Steven Yeun) death exactly as it happens in the comic series.

"Eventually a character named Negan is introduced and he's going to bash in Glenn's brains with a baseball bat called Lucille," Kirkman said in the clip below. The crowd gasps in horror. But earlier during the game Kirkman said Maggie (Lauren Cohan) and Eugene (Josh McDermitt) die in the upcoming episode. Cohan and McDermitt were also guests on the show and they were all giving joke spoilers.

"It's a comedy show!" Kirkman said. Another "spoiler" he drops involves the gang finding a working Chili's and watching the canceled AMC series Low Winter Sun.

Glenn's death in the comic series—his TV demise has been rumored for months—happens at the hands of warlord Negan and his baseball bat adorned in barbed wire. Negan refers to the bat as Lucille. Negan has yet to be cast...as far as we know.

When E! News spoke with Yeun in July 2014, months before the show's premiere, he addressed the rumors. "Ugh, I mean," he said, pausing. "Sometimes it's rough, I mean sometimes its awesome. We will see what happens, yeah."

At the red carpet premiere for season five of The Walking Dead, Yeun discussed Negan's potential arrival. "Well we'll see what happens when he shows up," he told Kristin Dos Santos. "I'm ready, I've been doing squats. So I can kick real hard. I'll be alright. I'm just gonna kick him. yeah, squat kicks all day."

However, The Walking Dead has deviated quite a bit from the comic series. Two characters—here's your spoiler warning—Beth (Emily Kinney) and Tyreese (Chad L. Coleman) were just killed off in very different manners than in the comics.

Showrunner Scott M. Gimple has discussed the differences between the show and the comic at length.

"Kirkman is more about departures from the comics than I have been in the past. His approach is more like, ‘Oh it's all good, we've seen that in the comic. We can mix it up,'" Gimple told The Hollywood Reporter back in July 2013. "I've been more hardcore about keeping true to the exact story of the comic. Kirkman wound up loosening me up a little more about it, as far playing with different things going in different directions…It's funny, in some ways the things that divert from the comic this year have actually served being closer to the comic in some way. There's going to be some looping around to the comic and remixing. That's how I essentially look at it: It's a remix of the comic."

See for yourself what happens to Glenn on The Walking Dead on Sundays at 9 p.m. on AMC.