The villainous Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) has been the talk of the town throughout this season of The Walking Dead, even though he has never actually appeared onscreen. He is set to make his bloody grand entrance in the season 6 finale, two episodes from now, and during an interview with Entertainment Weekly, showrunner Scott M. Gimple was asked whether his entrance would copy his first appearance in the comic book.
We'll avoid spoiling anything, but let's say the core cast's number would be reduced before five minutes have passed. Here's what Gimple had to say:
Let me put it this way: Whatever it is, it’s really just all in service to being faithful to the comic book inasmuch as one can. That’s always going to be relatively subjective as to what that means. But taking inspiration from the moments of the comic book and playing them out to the ends of what it can be, it’s all just like taking that moment from the book and figuring out a way to turn it up to get those feelings that it gave you and those emotions that it gave you that much more.
Sometimes we have things from the book that people who read the comics maybe see coming a mile away, and we try to adjust that so that we can give them the same feeling they had when reading the book, which might have been shock or surprise or fear, any of those things. It might be wildly different, but it’s all to get the same sort of feelings that you got when you read them. So will it be different? Absolutely. Will it be the same thing? Absolutely.
That's a very vague, showrunnery answer, but it sounds like we can only expect the unexpected. But seeing how it's a season finale, it's sure to be bloody and brutal. Hooray!
In the penultimate episode, "East":
When someone goes missing in Alexandria, the community goes on alert, and search parties venture out.
The Walking Dead stars Andrew Lincoln, Steven Yeun, Norman Reedus, Chandler Riggs, Lauren Cohan, Danai Gurira, Melissa McBride, Sonequa-Martin Green, Michael Cudlitz, Merritt Wever, Xander Berkeley, Tom Payne, Alicia Witt. The Walking Dead finale will air with a 90 minute expanded run time on April 3rd at 9 PM on AMC.