Angela Kang On Why She (Mostly) Stayed True to The Walking Dead Comics For Alpha’s Death

This week’s Walking Dead shocker might have been surprising to most fans, but comic loyalists have seen it coming for years. Even though The Walking Dead has a penchant for remixing major character deaths for the show (see: Abraham, Jesus, Carl), Showrunner Angela Kang made sure that Negan would always be the one to end Alpha. “It’s one of my favorites parts of the comic and we knew that we wanted to do this story of Negan as the one that ultimately kills Alpha,” Kang told Entertainment Weekly. “We really liked the idea of doing this partway through the back half, not in the finale,” she said.

Outside the Lydia cabin switcheroo, one of the biggest differences from the comics is that Carol orchestrated the whole thing. In the comics, Carol died way back in the prison, so Negan went lone wolf on the Alpha plan. Thankfully, we’ll get to see more of that in the show after Michonne’s last episode. “(Carol & Negan) clearly had a plan, and we’ll explore this in episodes to come, but Negan being Negan, how do you really kind of control where he’s at?” Kang said. “And it’s always important for me with that character to be true to Negan. Negan has a selfishness problem at the end of the day. I think he is somebody who has been trying to redeem himself, but there is that edge, and he’s so interesting to me in the fact that he sometimes lives in that gray area.”

So after killing Alpha, is Negan redeemed? Kang continued, “Negan still has road to travel, even in his own attempts to redeem himself. And so there are ways in which the respect that Alpha showed him for somebody who was trapped in a jail cell and picking tomatoes and wanting to be something more — there’s something really seductive about that to somebody like Negan. And so we always wanted to play that complicated layer with all of it.”

What do YOU think about Negan after this episode? Tell us in the comments and catch the rest of the interview over at Entertainment Weekly!