The Walking Dead showrunner drops hints about Carol's covert mission

Warning: This article contains spoilers for Sunday's episode of The Walking Dead, "New Haunts."

Uh oh, someone let Carol near the cookies again! And that can't be good news for the people in power at the Commonwealth. When we first saw Carol (Melissa McBride) on this week's episode of The Walking Dead, "New Haunts," she had settled in (or should we say "blended in") to the Commonwealth, walking out with a tray of cookies from Elodie's Treats.

But much like her sweet-tooth introduction to Alexandria when she first went undercover upon joining that new community, Carol had a covert mission in mind — this time to do whatever it took to help Ezekiel (Khary Payton) jump the line for the medical treatment that could save his life. And she knew what to do and where to go to get it.

Finding a stash of vintage wine to impress at a fancy-shmancy party, Carol presented the gift to Commonwealth snake-oil salesman Lance Hornsby (Josh Hamilton) in the hopes of setting up a tit-for-tat favor system, and by the end of the episode it appeared the two's interests were indeed aligned… for now.

Carol working an angle is perhaps not all that shocking, but Daryl (Norman Reedus) helping a bratty, disrespectful, snot-nosed jerk curry favor in the community certainly was. After Mercer (Michael James Shaw) gave Daryl a speech about fitting in and finding a good home in the Commonwealth, Daryl allowed Pamela Milton's son Sebastian (Teo Rapp-Olsson) to take the credit for catching the unhinged waiter (Tyler Davis) who wielded a knife at Pamela's big soiree.

Why would Daryl do such a thing? What's Carol's long game? And what should we make of the secret room of resistance that Rosita (Christian Serratos) discovered at the end? We asked showrunner Angela Kang all that and more.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Can you tells us about starting the episode with the zombie haunted house pump-fake? That was a super fun way to start the episode.

ANGELA KANG: Yeah, I believe that was a pitch from Magali Lozano. She is my longtime assistant on the show, and this was her first script that she wrote for us. She is now a full-fledged member of the writing staff to finish out the season, and she pitched "What if we did Halloween from the comics?" Because we never have done this iconic moment where our characters landed in Alexandria and Carl is like, "Wow, it is weird how they celebrate Halloween."

So Halloween has been the backdrop in an episode before, but we have never put it front and center. And so she came up with this really great idea to do this haunted house, and walkers are almost just a joke or for fun. It is fun, scary to them. And that is pretty surreal for somebody like Judith and R.J., who have grown up under different circumstances.

As I watched it, I started thinking about the end of the Walking Dead comic books, with a grown-up Hershel and the traveling zombie roadshow element. I do not know if you all made that connection at all, but I immediately went there.

Yeah, we did think about that and just how in different circumstances you are going to look at walkers differently. And it just shows they think they are so safe that it is not a big deal to just kind of be like, "Yeah, people are dressed up as zombies. We can pretend to be scared."

What was it like coming up with what kind of jobs everyone was going to get in the Commonwealth? Obviously you have the comic books as source material for what certain characters might do, but you also could have some fun coming up with what their roles would be in this society.

For us, it's really fun to think about what people did. A lot of it was already either set up in the show or we were drawing on inspiration from the comics. But whenever we kind of had a question, we just think about, "Well, what do we think is the backstory of this character?" The thing that we do know about our characters is most of them did not come from the upper classes. Yumiko is the rare example of somebody who was from a white-shoe law firm, so she kind of like landed in this other strata.

Whereas most of our other characters, they just had normal jobs, and a lot of them struggled quite a lot before the apocalypse. And it was kind of like, well, we should see Ezekiel in the closest thing they have to zookeeping. And so that was really cool to kind of put him back into tending to animals. You see he is great at it. And he is so gentle with the children and with the animals. And you kind of understand, well, this is the guy who then became a king in the apocalypse.

So for us, it was really fun to see our characters in very different circumstances than we have seen them. But also it makes us think, wow, the world really, really changed when it fell, and it seems so arbitrary when you see them go back to these things.

Was there ever any doubt that Carol would be making cookies at the bakery?

We were like, what did Carol do? It was like, she has to have a job here, but we do not know what her job was [before the apocalypse]. It actually makes sense that she would just work a nice retail bakery job. We just thought that was a really fun nod back to what she did at Alexandria, and gets to run into a variety of people there.

It's a very benign job. And we wanted to have that kind of play. We thought it would be really fun to have her coming out with the cookies. So that was one of the early shots that we talked about in the room that we wanted, was Carol coming out with cookies. We thought that would be a lot of fun.

So what is going on here with Carol and Lance Hornsby? She gets him some wine for a favor. How is that relationship going to look going forward?

What we talked about with Carol is that we know she is one of the smartest people in our group, and she definitely is somebody where what her life was before the apocalypse was not reflective in any way of her capability. And I think that just tells you something about what society was like for her. And she pretty quickly keys into who moves things at the Commonwealth and who gets things done. So that becomes kind of an important relationship going forward. I will not say more than that, other than to say she is very smart about who she falls in with and why.

Let's talk a little bit about Daryl. Why does he ultimately allow Jerky McJerkface there to take credit for capturing the waiter with the knife? Obviously Mercer gave him a little talking-to earlier and some advice. Why does he decide to go down that path?

What we talked about for Daryl is that Daryl is a guy who is so straightforward, and what you see is what you get. But this season he has had to do a lot of, I guess you would call it masking, being in situations where he had to be undercover with the Reapers, and now it is a different kind of a mask. So even when he becomes a trooper, he is literally disappearing behind this trooper mask.

But he is realizing that to survive in this society is a different kind of survival than they have had to do before. And so it is like, "All right, I do not want to be in the crosshairs of the son of the leader of this place. He is also a little pathetic, and what does it hurt me really to just let him take the credit? Maybe that helps me not make an enemy like straight off, because I have got to really worry about the children, and what do I care for my pride?" Daryl does not care about getting credit. He cares about making a life for Judith and R.J., and so that is top of mind for him.

I can only imagine how happy Norman was to get some Motörhead into an episode. He must have been ecstatic to have that be part of the soundtrack.

So funny. We did not even talk about it, but I am sure because with his musical taste I know that he will think that is cool. Magali came up with putting in that song, and we were so happy to put it in.

Well, "Eat the Rich" is certainly thematically fitting with the episode, which leads to our next question: What should we make of this secret room that Rosita finds at the end with the posters getting made up?

What Rosita kind of stumbles into, she is starting to see the underbelly of this place. We saw a lot of what the citizens are seeing day-to-day. We are seeing what the rich get to see versus what everybody else gets to experience. And then she is realizing there are more layers to peel back, and also that there is some anger against troopers too. And so we are really left with the same question that Rosita has, which is: What have I gotten myself into by joining these troopers? And what does it mean that there are people who have this level of discontent here?

What's coming up next week?

We are going to get deeper into the story of the Commonwealth. And one character we didn't really check in with here is Eugene [Josh McDermitt], and we're going to be following Eugene's story really strongly in [season 11, episode 11]. Michael Cudlitz came back to direct this and did an amazing job. And it has got a really cool classic cinematic vibe. There is a very neo-noir element to this, which is part of what we are exploring in the Commonwealth. And then we will also kind of deal with some fallout from the events with Tyler Davis from at the party, and that will bring in some of our other characters.

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