The Walking Dead caused quite the controversy with its season six finale; after introducing the new villain Negan, they chose to hide the identity of his victim and instead switched to a POV view as Lucille came crashing down, leaving fans sweating for seven months over the fate of their favourite characters. Now, with a little over a month to go before the season seven premiere, showrunner Scott M. Gimple has been speaking about the fan backlash to the cliffhanger in an interview with Entertainment Weekly.
“I wasn’t surprised,” states Gimple. “It’s a very passionate audience and I wasn’t surprised that there was some of that. I guess I was surprised how intense some folks got. But passion is passionate and if they have it for the show, after six years, I guess we’ve just got to take our lumps. I believe in what we’re doing. I believe in the story that that cliffhanger is the lynchpin of, and those story aspects that invite an audience to engage with their imagination, and to think about things and discuss things… Of course, we did not seek to make anybody angry. But we are going to stretch and we are going to take risks on behalf of the audience. All of this is on behalf of the audience.”
SEE ALSO: Who will meet Lucille? The Walking Dead season 7 promos tease Negan’s victim
“It was all about expectations. People were like, ‘Oh, well, here’s what happens when Negan arrives on the scene’. And the expectation was, ‘Oh, it’ll be this way and that’s the way it should be and that’s the way it is in my head.’ And I understand that. But it’s also a question of trying to do things that fulfill the spirit of the story and the spirit of the comic, without it being exactly the comic. And to tell you the truth, that’s very much something that I do, as somebody who came to The Walking Dead as a comics’ reader, initially. But I feel some of the readers were like, “Oh, this is going to happen, this is exactly what it is.” And we wanted to give them a new experience, and to give them an experience of suspense and fear, because they don’t know what’s going to happen. What’s actually happening on the show to characters, we want them to feel it. We want them to be surprised.”
Of course we don’t have too long to wait now until we find out who is on the receiving end of Lucille, with The Walking Dead season seven set to get underway on October 23rd.
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Originally published August 31, 2016. Updated December 16, 2019.
