Jon Bernthal will return in an episode of The Walking Dead season 9

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

AMC's The Walking Dead seems to be falling apart in front of our eyes. After the poor decisions of the last couple seasons, the next season, the show's ninth, will see the departure of series lead Andrew Lincoln, who plays Rick Grimes, and Lauren Cohan/Maggie. 

It has been said that Rick and Maggie will only be appearing in six episodes each… and it looks like Rick is going to be having some kind of flashback to the pre-apocalypse or early zombie apocalypse days before he makes his exit. Recently Jon Bernthal, who played Rick's friend-turned-nemesis Shane Walsh back in the first two seasons of the show, was spotted hanging around the Walking Dead set, and TVLine has been able to confirm that Bernthal will be appearing in one episode of the upcoming season as Shane.

No details on Bernthal's guest appearance have been revealed, but it has to be either a flashback or a hallucination, because Shane has been dead for a long time.

With Rick leaving the show, Norman Reedus has reportedly been offered a huge sum of money ($20 million, according to rumors) to remain on the show so his character Daryl Dixon can be promoted into the lead.

We'll see how The Walking Dead handles these shake-ups when it returns this fall.

Regardless of what happens around his appearance, it will be cool to see Bernthal on the show one more time. I have joked that, since the days of Rick are coming to an end, the series should go back to the events of the season 2 finale and branch off into an alternate reality where Shane killed Rick instead of vice versa. The chances of that being what happens in his season 9 episode are around zero percent.