‘The Walking Dead’: Here’s How Carl Died

In case you couldn’t figure it out from the headline, spoilers for The Walking Dead midseason premiere, “Honor.”

Carl Grimes (Chandler Riggs) is dead. We knew this was inevitable after the midseason finale “How It’s Gotta Be” revealed that Carl had been bitten by a zombie. And though other bites have led to hacked off limbs, saving the afflicted from dying; Carl had been bitten hours if not days earlier — and right on his side, meaning unless they have the tech to preserve his head like on Futurama, it was way too late for the young hero.

Tonight’s midseason premiere filled in a few of the holes in the timeline… As many fans suspected, Carl suffered the bite while saving Siddiq (Avi Nash) back in the sixth episode of the season (“The King, The Widow and Rick”). Carl decided to keep the bite hidden — he already knew he wasn’t going to survive — until he could say goodbye to his father Rick (Andrew Lincoln) and de facto mother Michonne (Danai Gurira), which meant also waiting until they all hopefully survived Negan’s (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) attack on the Alexandria Safe-Zone, their home. Carl heroically ushered the rest of the Alexandrians into the sewer tunnels beneath the town, and by the time Rick and Michonne returned home, Carl was already close to death.

This episode, the time was split between Morgan (Lennie James), who is wrestling with some demons of his own, and Carl’s last moments with Michonne and Rick. Showrunner Scott Gimple has been pretty open about the reason Carl needed to die: he’s a chess piece that helps Rick get from wanting to kill every one of the villainous Saviors, including their leader Negan; to understanding that there’s a better way.

That played out over the episode as Rick and Carl reminisced about old times. But the biggest reveal was that the vision of the “future” fans have taken to calling the “Old Man Rick” vision, first glimpsed in the Season 8 premiere, was actually Carl’s vision of the future right before he died. We’ve seen this sort of thing play out before on the show, as zombie bites tend to induce hallucinations. Here, we got to see a look right out of the comic books: Rick with a beard, Carl and Judith grown up and happy, the communities all working together to farm and retake the world from the zombie horde.

Carl shares this vision with Rick, and Rick agrees. “You can still be who you were, that’s how it can be,” Carl tells his father. “I want this for you, Dad.”

“I’m gonna make it real, I promise,” Rick tells him. “I’m gonna make it real.”

And there you have it: chess piece moved. Rick isn’t going to renege on a promise to his dying son, and from here on out will work to bring peace, instead of war. Rick’s last line to Carl, in fact, is a reiteration of this promise: “I’ll make it real,” Rick tells him. “I will, I will.”

Before that, though, Carl decides to go out on his own terms. The group has made a rule, Carl remembers, that you can’t commit suicide if you get a zombie bite — someone you love has to shoot you in the head, so you don’t come back as a walker. But Carl has grown up, and insists that he — not Rick or Michonne — has to be the one to do it.

He tells Michonne he loves her. He tells his Dad he loves him. They say it back. And as Rick and Michonne are outside the broken, burnt church where they’ve been saying goodbye to their son, they hear a gunshot. Rick’s head falls in his hands. Michonne, still standing, crumples. And together they dig a grave for Carl Grimes.

It’s completely, utterly heartbreaking. And to be frank, I was not expecting to be so gutted by this scene, but I was.

That’s not the end, though, because we get one more glimmer of Carl’s vision: Negan is there, happily farming with everyone else, saying hello to Carl’s sister Judith. And then we see Rick, connecting to a scene we thought was him having the vision of the future, where he sits red-eyed and covered in blood next to a tree where two stained glass windows hang. Did Rick follow up on his promise? Or betray his son’s last request?

Guess we’ll have to watch the rest of the season to find out.

Where to stream The Walking Dead