‘The Walking Dead’ Season 11 Premiere: Angela Kang Weighs in on Maggie vs. Negan

Spoilers for The Walking Dead Season 11 premiere, “Acheron Part 1” past this point.

The Season 11 premiere of The Walking Dead is atypical for the show in that it has two trains running that never quite meet. On one end you have a group back in the remnants of Alexandria, dealing with a severe food shortage. On the other, you have a smaller group being interrogated by who fans of the comic know are a highly organized society known as The Commonwealth. But the main event of either storyline? Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) versus Maggie (Lauren Cohan).

“We knew that Lauren Cohan was coming back into the season,” The Walking Dead showrunner Angela Kang told Decider, “and it felt like we just owed some story related to where she’s been, and where she’s at now.”

When we last saw Maggie before her sudden return at the end of Season 10 (and in that season’s “bonus” episodes), she had left Hilltop in search of a better life. That means she was gone when Negan, the man who killed her husband Glenn (Steven Yeun), became a tentative ally of the people who Maggie trusted most. And when she returned, Maggie could barely contain her rage even looking at Negan.

Those simmering tensions boiled over this episode, leading to a very, very dark, literal cliffhanger. At the end of the hour, as the group Maggie and Negan are both in is trying to escape down a tunnel to safety from an encroaching zombie herd, Maggie is left hanging from a ladder. Negan looks at her, then makes the decision to back off, with Maggie tumbling directly into the herd.

“The dynamic between Maggie and Negan is fundamentally really interesting to us as writers,” Kang noted. “And hopefully, it will be interesting to fans who wonder what’s going to happen between them, too… In some ways they’ve moved towards each other, and their philosophies. If he was much darker, and she was much lighter, and they started going towards the middle… They have many points of agreement on certain things, but they just can’t stand each other or trust each other, because of the past.”

Continuing, Kang added that the end of episode moment is, “a really particular example of how that plays out in a very high stakes, tension-filled relationship, where you have two people that are both very unpredictable right now. That was driving a lot of our decisions, to focus on some of that, because … We had curiosity as writers, in terms of when you put people like that together, what happens?”

While Negan and Maggie push each other further apart (assuming Maggie survives that fall, of course, wink wink), one character in particular is merging with another. Over in the other storyline, Yumiko (Eleanor Matsuura) is attempting to escape from the soldiers holding them prisoner, when Princess (Paola Lázaro) makes a surprising discovery: on the wall of the lost kept by the soldiers is a picture of none other than… Yumiko.

Fans of the comic books know what’s going on here, though true to form the TV show has remixed and tweaked some elements. And in this case, for a very good reason: this iconic plot point initially involved Michonne (Danai Gurira), who has already left the series. In the books, Michonne discovers that her daughter, long thought dead, is not only alive, but living with the Commonwealth. Here, Yumiko discovers that her brother is alive and looking for here, which leads her to return to captivity.

“This was one of these things where there is an important purpose, which is that it gives you a certain level of initial trust that you wouldn’t have otherwise, because people are sketchy in the apocalypse,” Kang said. “And so, we felt that was something that was valuable to try to hold onto the spirit of [from the comic]. But obviously since Michonne is gone, and Danai is off doing amazing things, we had to think about, what characters can you play that class dynamic with?”

According to Kang, Yumiko came to mind because she had previously been set up as a lawyer due to her relationship with Magna (Nadia Hilker) — a job that Michonne also held down in the pre-apocalypse in the books, so it was an easy one to one sub-in.

“Many of our characters, being from blue collar professions, or having really struggled before the apocalypse hits in the story, there’s very few people that have that more elevated class,” Kang said. “Yumiko was one of our best options to try it with. Obviously, a brother/sister relationship is different from a parent/child, but we decided to just dive into the fact that it’s not really exactly the same story, and there are other things that we can do with it that way.”

If you’re confused, or haven’t read the books, just note that status will be very important going forward with the Commonwealth storyline — and that means Yumiko will be front and center. As for whether she’ll reunite with her brother, you’ll just have to stay tuned.

The Walking Dead airs Sundays at 9/8c on AMC, and streams a week earlier on AMC+.

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