For those anxiously awaiting the second half of The Walking Dead's sophomore season, this is the post for you.
For those still bummed that show runner/producer/director/series creator Frank Darabont was unceremoniously let go from the show, the following isn't going to make you feel any better. Last week, actor Sam Witwer, who's on the SyFy show Being Human and played the tank zombie in The Walking Dead's first season, told Paranormal Pop Culture (via CraveOnline) that he was originally going to be a larger part of the series. Check out part of his comments below (transcription by CraveOnline).
[Darabont] said to me, "Look, I think it would be really cool to tell a prequel story about how Atlanta fell, do Black Hawk Down, but with zombies, have a few main characters pass through, but the lead will be you. You're a soldier and all these horrible things happen, and the chain of command breaks down, and, eventually, you have to take out your superior officer. Then, eventually, in the end, you get bit." He's pitching me this. "You're crawling and you crawl into this tank and you have a grenade and you're going to blow yourself up, but you set the grenade next to you and you die. Then, we reprise the scene from the pilot, where Rick [Grimes] gets in the tank and there's a zombie there."
If you look closely, I played that zombie, because we were setting up this prequel we were going to do. If you watch the pilot of The Walking Dead, that's me in the tank as the zombie, and then Rick blasts him and he gets deafened, and he gets that grenade which saves him at the end of the season.
It's not happening now. Why? Because AMC wanted to save a few bucks. That is just one example of the kind of cool, awesome forethought, [Darabont] has put into this show, that is now absolutely written off. For me, it doesn't matter much because I'm busy doing Being Human. We were going to schedule things around. I'm not lamenting the loss of a job, I'm lamenting the loss of an amazing idea. And there are dozens and dozens of amazing ideas just like that, which are now gone.
And this is all because people wanted to save money. This is all because they felt it necessary to cut the budget by — when you add in the tax breaks they're pocketing — like 35%. Really? Budget cut? So, I'm not happy about it. And here's the thing, it's not as simple as don't support The Walking Dead because there are a lot of good people on that set. People who are busting ass to entertain all of us... People who have been threatened to not speak out over what happened. It's ugly... it's really ugly what happened.
Yikes. So, AICN decided to follow up with Darabont to see what he had to say about the aborted "tank guy" prequel and Darabont wrote a long letter detailing that he was going to start he second season with Witwer as his pre-zombie soldier character.
I wanted to kick off the 2nd season with the flashback episode Sam describes, which would have followed a squad of Army Rangers getting trapped in the city and trying to survive as Atlanta falls. The idea was to do this with a very focused “you are there” documentary feel. Not going all shaky-cam, but still making it a bit rawer and grainier than the rest of the show. We’d start with a squad of maybe seven or eight soldiers being dropped into the city by chopper. They have map coordinates they need to get to; they’ve been told to report to a certain place to provide reinforcement. It’s not a special mission, it’s basically a housekeeping measure putting more boots on the ground to reinforce key intersections and installations throughout the city. And we follow this group from the moment the copter sets them down. All they have to do is travel maybe a dozen blocks, a simple journey, but what starts as a no-brainer scenario goes from “the city is being secured” to “holy shit, we’ve lost control, the world is ending.” Our squad gets blocked at every turn and are soon just trying to survive. I wanted to do a really tense, character-driven ensemble story as communications break down, supply lines are lost, escape routes are cut off, morale falls apart, leadership unravels, mutinies heat up, etc. (Yes, this approach owes a spiritual debt to a number of great films, including Walter Hill’s Southern Comfort.)
Along the way, I thought we could briefly dovetail this story with a few established characters from the show. Not to overdo that, mind you, because it could get silly and too coincidental if you load too much into that idea. But I thought it would be great to veer off on a quick narrative detour that brushes our soldiers briefly up against some people we know. Picture our squad arriving at a manned barricade where some civilians are being held back from leaving the city on shoot-to-kill orders to stop the spread of contagion, it’s a panicked high-intensity scene, and in this crowd of desperate people we find Andrea and Amy. The barricade gunners panic, the civilians start to get mowed down by machine gun fire, and in this melee the girls get pulled to safety by some old guy they don’t even know. It’s Dale. He’s nobody to them, just some guy who saw the opportunity to do the right thing and reacted in the moment. This would have been perhaps a minute or two of the episode, just a cool detour like the various outposts the soldiers encounter in Saving Private Ryan, but we would have witnessed the moment that Dale meets Andrea and Amy, seen where that relationship began. I also felt it would be a great way to get Emma Bell back into the series for a moment, because she was so wonderful and we were all so sorry that her character died and she had to leave the show. (Of course if this “brush with established characters” idea didn’t work in the script stage, I’d have tossed it out. You try a lot of ideas like that as you go, see how they play. But I thought this one stood a pretty good chance of being engineered to work well.)
So the story follows these soldiers through hell as the city falls apart and the squad implodes, with Sam’s soldier being the main character and the moral center of the group. He becomes the last survivor of the squad, and he finally gets to the map coordinates they’ve been trying to get to from the start: it’s the barricade at the Atlanta courthouse intersection from the pilot where Rick later finds the tank. The soldier is still alive when he gets there, but he’s been bitten. He’s accomplished his “simple” mission, but he’s gone through seven kinds of hell to do it (including being forced to frag his squad leader), and now he’s dying. And he crawls off into the tank just to get off the street and under cover. As his fever builds and the poor guy starts to hallucinate, he pulls his last grenade and considers ending his life. He sets the grenade down on that shelf for a moment to reflect on all the shit and misery that brought him to this sad end-point of his life, and to dredge up the courage to pull the pin...but before he can act, the fever burns him out and he dies.
There's way more to the letter, so check it out here, but that's the bulk of what Darabont planned, and it is awesome and it sucks that it cannot be. If you're like me, you're super bummed that this great idea got kicked aside. Check out Witwer's full discussion about it below.
Meanwhile, the series is already done, and if you're curious about what to expect, comic book writer/co-creator and series writer/executive producer Robert Kirkman spoke to FEARnet recently about what could happen in the second half, which could mean losing more characters.
You know, it's The Walking Dead. I'm not guarantee it, but I'm gonna say that it's safe to… People are gonna die. Whether they're gonna be main characters I can't really say. I don't know what people consider to be a main character, but there are human characters on the show that will be not surviving. By the end of this season… We start with a cast on our second season, and we will end with a somewhat different cast. That's kind of what The Walking Dead is. So we'll see.
Coming into the second half of the season I think that we kind of hit the ground running, and there's a lot of stuff going on. I actually just watched episodes 11, 12 and 13 to review them, and it's just non-stop all kinds of cool stuff. I can't reveal much, but I will say that when we come back in February the first episode back has the best ending that I've thus seen. I was just super-thrilled when I got to that. It's just gonna be really cool stuff. We're gonna be introducing some new elements and some new characters, and some big things that you may not be expecting. It's gonna be pretty awesome.
Lastly, we hope we're not spoiling anything here, but if you haven't watched the first 7 episodes of the 2nd season and are reading this, then we won't feel bad because you should have watched them all by now.
Anyway, for those that have seen them, we all know that Sophia is the one who comes stumbling out of the barn to the shock of all the survivors, and AMC decided to have, well, an exit interview as it were, with actress Madison Lintz, who played the character on the show. Here's what she had to say about ending her time as Sophia.
It was surprising, but I could see how it worked out for the show. And I had to learn to get over it -- every job comes to an end!
I had some dreams that someone would say, "Oh guess what? Madison, we're going to make you live and you're going to kill all the zombies and solve the whole show!" It wasn't too bad though.
Being a zombie had its ups and downs. It was kind of disgusting, but it was a really good experience that I'm going to look back on and say that was amazing. They put me into zombie makeup in front of a mirror so it wasn't like a surprise seeing me as a zombie -- I got to watch it.
