Chandler Riggs talks about the future of Carl on The Walking Dead

If you're a devoted viewer of AMC's The Walking Dead but haven't yet watched the season 8 midseason finale that aired last night, you might want to wait and read this article after you watch the episode because there are major SPOILERS below. SPOILERS so big that I didn't even give them away in my review of the show…

If you're still reading, I hope you're already aware that the finale ended with the reveal that wayward teenager Carl Grimes had been bitten by a zombie, and this bite wasn't on an arm or leg that could be cut off to save his life. Carl is going to suffer the effects of that bite. He is going to die.

The actor who plays Carl, Chandler Riggs, confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter that his time on The Walking Dead is coming to an end… and despite what you may expect, the fact that Riggs was planning to go to college had nothing to do with his character being written off the show. Riggs intended to stick around on The Walking Dead, especially since Carl plays an important role in future storylines within the comic book source material.

Riggs told THR, 

Leaving Walking Dead wasn't my decision. It was all story related. It made sense story-wise for it to happen for Rick and Michonne and all the other characters. … (Showrunner Scott M. Gimple) was trying to figure out how to bridge the gap between Rick not wanting to kill Negan [in the comics] and Rick also really wanting to kill Negan, which he does right now [in the show's story]. Scott's way to get around that was to make Carl this really humanitarian figure and person who could see the good in people and see that people can change and not everyone out there is bad. That's what Carl's talk to Rick was in this episode: there's no way that they can kill every one of the Saviors and not everyone is a bad person and there has to be some way forward than just killing people."

Carl's dying moments will be featured in the midseason premiere when The Walking Dead returns to AMC airwaves in a few months.

Episode 809 is really Carl trying to teach Rick as much as he can about what he's learned and trying to convince Rick to not kill every single Savior because there's still good people out there. The Alexandrians, the Hilltop and the Kingdom — all those people probably see him as a villain like the Saviors. There's some humanitarian aspects that Carl is going to try and teach Rick in his final moments. … You'll see bits and pieces and memories of Carl throughout the second half. But his final moments are coming pretty soon."

Riggs was so sure that he would be on The Walking Dead for seasons to come that he recently bought a home in Georgia, near where the show is filmed. With his reason for being in Georgia now removed, he's planning to head out to Los Angeles and focus on acting and music for a while before going to college. Although the news that Carl would be dying was shocking and devastating at first, Riggs sees a bright side to it now – 

It ended up being a great thing because now I get to do all kinds of other stuff that I haven't been able to do in the last eight years. … I was excited to do a lot of those storylines in the comics because there's a lot of really cool stuff. I'm more excited to do other things than The Walking Dead than I was excited about doing those things on Walking Dead."

So Carl doesn't have much of a future on The Walking Dead, but for Chandler Riggs the future is now wide open.

As much as Carl tended to annoy me, I can't really see why Gimple would choose to kill him off. There are plenty of other humanitarian characters on the show who could have gotten through to Rick. Carl could have even gotten through to him without dying. It seems like a bad move to take the character out of the show when he had so much more to do in the comics… but I'll be watching to see how this all turns out.