The stars and executive producers of The Walking Dead have been doing some major damage control after the infamous season six finale=, promising that it was always supposed to be a (terrible) cliffhanger and that showrunner Scott Gimple hasn’t even determined Negan’s victim yet. So, um, why does former TWD star Tyler James Williams know who dies?
Williams, who played Noah and died off in season five, is still friends with people on the show. A current cast member informed him which character would be killed while the show was in the middle of filming season six. Williams also told Entertainment Weekly:
You have to understand [showrunner Scott M. Gimple] knows everything seasons and seasons out, so people knew, but we can’t say anything. No one can say anything. So it’s actually better to say that we don’t know.
Of course Gimple knows what happens on his show in advance. Of course he wouldn’t write a cliffhanger without knowing how to resolve it. It would be insane not to. This is how shows are run.
This is why the cast spoke openly (if obliquely) about knowing who died in the lead up to the finale. And it’s why they have all had to backtrack their comments, when the finale was changed to a cliffhanger which pissed everyone off, and pretend that this was always going to be how the episode ended. It wasn’t. You’re lying.
Which, by the way, is exactly as insulting to its fans as the obnoxious bait-and-switch in the episode. Stop lying. Own it. We won’t like it, but we already don’t like it. So why not choose the option that shows us a tiny bit of respect?