‘The Walking Dead’ Ends With a Promise of More Life - The New York Times

The 11th and final season of “The Walking Dead” concluded Sunday night by teeing up several impending spinoffs.

This article includes spoilers for the series finale of “The Walking Dead.”.

When it debuted on AMC in the fall of 2010, “The Walking Dead” was something of an aberration in the prestige TV landscape — a gory, effects-heavy horror-drama for adults that combined graphic, grand guignol violence with the strong moral center of shows like “The Sopranos” and “Breaking Bad.” It soon emerged as an unlikely hit: At the height of its popularity, around 2013-16, it became one of the most-watched cable TV series in history, with roughly 21 million people tuning in to the Season 7 premiere to find out who was killed by the new villain Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) after the previous season’s much-discussed (and wildly controversial) cliffhanger finale.

They include Andrew Lincoln, who starred as the series lead, Rick Grimes, before leaving midway through Season 9.

Of the original group of survivors, only the fan-favorites Daryl (Norman Reedus) and Carol (Melissa McBride) remain, flanked by a handful of multiseason stalwarts like Negan, Maggie (Lauren Cohan), Father Gabriel (Seth Gilliam) and Eugene (Josh McDermitt).

The penultimate episode, last week, left us with a vintage “Walking Dead” cliffhanger: The plucky Judith Grimes (Cailey Fleming) is shot during a tense standoff between the core group and the Commonwealth’s now fully villainous powers that be, and while attempting to save her before she bleeds out, Daryl, Carol and the others are surrounded on all sides by flesh-eating walkers.

Here are five takeaways from the long-awaited end of “The Walking Dead.”.

Carol and the others soon join them inside, but while Judith’s condition has begun to stabilize — thanks to a generous (and very convenient) blood transfusion from Daryl, whose blood type, he reveals, “goes with anybody” — Luke (Dan Fogler) and his girlfriend, Jules (Alex Sgambati), are not so lucky, succumbing to their zombie wounds.

Baby in tow, the three reconvene with Daryl, Carol and the others, now also joined by Maggie, Negan, Aaron (Ross Marquand) and Lydia (Cassady McClincy).

Mercer doesn’t like it and tells the group that he intends to save the people and take her down — on his own, if necessary.

In the aftermath, the people of the Commonwealth come together to eat and drink to the sounds of Fleetwood Mac.

(“I don’t want to hate you anymore,” she tells him. Expect the healing to continue in the coming Maggie-Negan spinoff, “Dead City,” due next year.) Negan even gets a slight, respectful nod from Daryl, which is perhaps the biggest sign so far that people are finally ready to accept his redemption.

Daryl Dixon, ever the nomad, is preparing to leave the Commonwealth behind and head out on the open road on his motorbike to find … well, it’s hard to say.

Of course, one of the biggest differences between “The Walking Dead” and its source material is that the story’s original hero, Rick Grimes, exited the show four years ago, whereas he remained the main character of the comic book throughout its run.

The final moments of “The Walking Dead” show us Rick wandering a corpse-strewn beach, penning a letter to his family and stuffing it into a bottle.

A Lincoln-led mini-series about Rick’s continuing adventures is in the works, and here we get a few tantalizing glimpses of what it might be like: Rick is on his own and on the run, and after hurling his message in a bottle into the sea, he is tracked down by some men in a helicopter who warn him by megaphone that he has no choice but to surrender.