So it goes with highly anticipated projects whose details are shrouded in secrecy, AMC’s The Walking Dead spinoff is the eye of a rumor hurricane as of late, and it’s only in the pilot stages. Despite the official denial of any crossover events between the pilot and the flagship series, that’s what conversations keep swarming around, and this is the dooziest info yet, as The Nerdist claims a spinoff character will be on The Walking Dead before the spinoff even airs.
According to The Nerdist’s sources, at least one of the leads from the offshoot (which will almost definitely get a series order) will appear in The Walking Dead for a six-episode arc in Season 6. That’s some serious future-scoopage if it’s true, post-dating what will undoubtedly be a lot of creative team hemming and hawing over the subject. Because Nerdist mastermind Chris Hardwick is the host of AMC’s chat show Talking Dead, it just seems like these guys would get good intel.
The pilot, which now has the working titles Cobalt and Fear the Walking Dead (gleaned from a leaked part of the script), is reportedly set soon after the walker apocalypse occurs, when things haven’t quite gone rotted bananas yet. So that would necessarily mean that whatever character we get to know in the pilot is living on his or her own by the time Rick and his crew make it past the rest of Season 5’s deadly dangers. Unless it’s some kind of a weird six-episode flashback, a tactic popular series have been known to get mired in.
Right now, we’ve got Kim Dickens as school guidance counselor Nancy Tomkins, who’s dating teacher Sean Cabrera, played by Cliff Curtis. Will either of them show up? Or will it be Nancy’s kids Nick (Frank Dillane) or the ambitious Ashley (Alycia Debnam Carey)? Or perhaps one of the as yet uncast characters, like Sean’s son Cody or his ex-wife Andrea? Whoever it is would need to get from Los Angeles across the country in however long it is between the two series, although it would probably be easier to drive in the early days before there were just corpses and broken vehicles everywhere.
You can watch the Nerdist News video in its entirety below.
Bleeding Cool recently got a hold of some alleged script pages – which is where the newish working title came from – and they were asked by a legal team to remove the excerpts from the script, though you can still find them elsewhere. That doesn’t make them completely legit, but it certainly strengthens the argument. Nothing too exciting was posted, but it gives one an idea of what’s possibly to come with this expansion of the Walking Dead universe.
But before all that, The Walking Dead will debut the second half of Season 5 on Sunday, February 8 on AMC. We’ve still got other characters to meet first.
