Viewers went into the ninth season of AMC's The Walking Dead with the knowledge that both Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) and Maggie Rhee (Lauren Cohan) were only going to be around for a limited time. Lincoln has left the show to spend more time with his family in England, while Cohan's number of episodes were cut down due to a contract dispute that wasn't worked out until after she had already taken a lead role on a different show, the upcoming ABC series Whiskey Cavalier. Although it was rumored that Rick and Maggie would be in six episodes of the new season, it turns out to have been five for both of them – while Rick's departure was the big news for Sunday's episode What Comes After, that episode also marks the exit of Maggie.
Showrunner Angela Kang confirmed to The Hollywood Reporter that Maggie won't be appearing on the show again any time soon:
That's the last of her for this season. We've been talking to Lauren and hopefully we'll get to tell more story for her. We definitely have some things up our sleeve that we'd love to do. A lot of that is just a scheduling conversation, so hopefully that will all work out, because I think mutually we would like to continue with Maggie's story, for sure."
AMC's programming president David Madden added,
I would hope it's not the last you'll see of her for the show, but she is not in any immediately forthcoming episodes. Angela and Lauren talk. They are actually friendly. And we would like to see her come back. A lot of that is going have to do with Whiskey Cavalier and what her availability then becomes, which we obviously don't control. But creatively, we would love to see her return to some degree. And we definitely feel there is more of Maggie's story to tell. We did not, as you have seen, kill her off in 905. We established that she is out there somewhere. And that's something we would like to pay off by having her return, if her schedule permits."
Rick's story will continue on in a series of at least three Walking Dead TV movies. When Scott M. Gimple, chief content officer of the Walking Dead franchise, was asked by Entertainment Weekly if we might see a movie that focuses on Maggie sometime, he replied,
That is absolutely a possibility. I will say that Angela and I and others really want to see Maggie back on the show. We have a lot of story for her that we want to tackle and we’ve talked about different ways we can do it. That said, if Whiskey Cavalier lights up the world, we’re still going to do Maggie stuff. We’re just going to figure out different ways to do it. It might be me shooting Lauren in between scenes of Whiskey Cavalier, of Maggie in a post-apocalyptic Prague (where Whiskey Cavalier is filming)."
So Maggie's departure didn't get any fanfare because there's still the possibility that she'll be showing up here and there in the future. I'm not surprised to hear that she won't be in the rest of the season – as I noted in my review of What Comes After, the main story that had to be resolved before she could leave was wrapped up in that episode. With the show now jumping ahead six years, it was the perfect time to say Maggie went away somewhere.
I'm going to miss having her around from episode to episode, though. Maggie has been one of my favorite characters ever since she first arrived back in season 2.