The Walking Dead EP: Potential in Spinoff About Variations of Walkers?

Toward the end of The Walking Dead’s 11-season run, the AMC drama sharpened its focus on variations of walkers — for instance, zombies that could climb or had enough sense memory left in their rotting brains to pick up and use crude weapons.

And although showrunner Angela Kang is quick to tell TVLine that “I can’t really get into specifics” about any possible spinoff conversations, she does allow that “one of the things that we’d wanted to explore in this mothership version of The Walking Dead is the variation of walkers. 

“One of them is the lurkers that we’ve seen,” she adds. “You can even argue that there are certain rules, like with the way Michonne’s pets operate, for example. This is a variant of the walkers that we saw way back — walkers that could climb and pick things up and [so on].”

In the final stretch of episodes, Kang & Co. ratcheted up the threat that the variations posed — and perhaps gave yet another tease of what may be yet to come in the franchise. “We wanted to see what happens when you put [the variations] in a herd,” she says. “We’re definitely leaving a door open for things for people who also watched World Beyond. There was a little something at the end of that series that hinted that maybe things don’t develop the same in every single place.

“I think that’s all I can say without getting in trouble from the universe,” she continues with a laugh. “It’s more of a question for Scott Gimple,” the franchise’s chief content officer.

What do you think? No way can we have seen the last of the fast-reanimating, smarter walkers, right?