A few characters have just disappeared from AMC's The Walking Dead recently, but we know where we'll see some of them again – and it's not going to be on The Walking Dead. A wounded Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) was taken into the care of mysterious people who had been flying around in a helicopter for the last couple seasons. We'll find out where that helicopter took him when Rick returns in a trilogy of feature films. Dwight (Austin Amelio) was exiled for the things he did while working with the group called The Saviors, but he'll be turning up on The Walking Dead's companion series Fear the Walking Dead, which has been taken over by another character from The Walking Dead, Lennie James's Morgan.
It's less clear when we'll see Maggie (Lauren Cohan) again. When The Walking Dead jumped ahead six years after the disappearance of Rick, Maggie was no longer head of the Hilltop community. She wasn't even there anymore, she went off to work with the woman named Georgie (Jayne Atkinson) and help communities learn how to garden and build windmills and such. Or something like that. Cohan is now working on the ABC series Whiskey Cavalier, but when she signed on for that show she made sure she would be allowed to do some Walking Dead appearances on the side.
Showrunner Angela Kang has said she hopes to check in on Maggie sometime next season:
We will hopefully come back to Maggie's story in Season 10. Lauren and I have been texting about some things, and we're hopefully gonna schedule a conversation, but Georgie's group is definitely out there in the world doing some stuff, and I have some notion of what they're up to. They may also be part of the universe in general. That's really up to Scott [Gimple], but we'll see how it all plays out. In our minds, there's a lot of things going on in the world around our characters and the way that it intersects with our story, that's part of what we're talking about currently."
But there's another option. Talking with the press after a Whiskey Cavalier panel, Cohan was asked if Maggie might get her own spin-off. She answered,
There may have been some conversations but everything is so early days ambiguous. Me, as much as anybody, we'll have to see what happens."
It sounds like Kang and Gimple are pondering whether or not Maggie should appear on The Walking Dead during season 10, or get her own show (a Maggie mini-series?), or maybe both.
As Cohan says, "we'll have to see". Even though she took the job on Whiskey Cavalier because there was a communication breakdown between her and AMC during contract negotiations, she doesn't have any hard feelings toward the network.
I don't even think that it was bad. It was like, I've done the show for a long time. It was a long time to be in any character, and sometimes you just get quiet and listen to your inner guidance, and it's time to multitask."
While we wait to see how things are going to work out for Cohan/Maggie, there could be more complicated contract negotiations ahead for AMC: Michonne (Danai Gurira) has taken over as leader of the Alexandria community in Rick's absence, and she's a very important character on the show. But Gurira's contract is up at the end of this season. She has recently been branching out into the BLACK PANTHER and AVENGERS films, so her future with The Walking Dead is uncertain.