AMC released a new trailer for the forthcoming eighth season of The Walking Dead today at their San Diego Comic-Con panel.
While the trailer itself showcased a lot of action ahead in Season 8, it was the vignette at the very end of the SDCC trailer -- starting at around the 4:40 mark here -- that got our gears turning and might hint at a major time-jump for the characters that also happened in the comics. Or, for the show, maybe it's all just a fantasy.
SPOILERS ahead for both Walking Dead the show and the comic!
There's a shot of the handle of a cane followed by a shot of flowers in a vase in the foreground with a blurry man resting in the background. The third and final shot is a close-up of a bare-chested Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) waking up in bed.
But he's an older Rick with gray hair and a bushier, much grayer beard. His eyes pop open as if awakening from a dream. Or a coma.
The whole sequence plays like an homage to the series' very first episode ("Days Gone Bye") when Rick woke up from his coma in the hospital room in Atlanta after being shot. Rick had some feverish memories of Shane visiting him and leaving him flowers. When he snapped out of it and turned to look at the vase, the flowers were long dead. Rick thereafter discovered he had woken up in a post-apocalyptic world.
The series of shots in the SDCC 2017 promo are similar. So was this whole zombie -- okay, okay, walker -- apocalypse just a bad dream had by old man Rick? Maybe it all never happened, he lived to be old (old enough to need a cane to walk or perhaps from an injury), and Shane never died and had left flowers for his former partner just as he had back after Rick was shot?
The whole show being a bad dream is one possibility but a highly unlikely one given how much of a backlash that it would undeniably and, frankly, justifiably spark. Two more likely scenarios are that this is just a fantasy sequence/different type of dream Rick is having, or it's a time-jump in the series' narrative.
The fact that these last twenty or so seconds of the SDCC 2017 trailer is shot in a gauzy filter is a filmic trope that indicates it's not reality we're seeing (it's a visual tactic usually reserved for depicting memories or dreams).
However, the most likely answer might come from the comics themselves. Following the events of the comics' story arc "All Out War," which Season 8 of the show is adapting, the comics' continuity jumps ahead a few years with "A New Beginning." Negan has been defeated and imprisoned by Rick, but not before Rick suffers a bad leg injury that ultimately requires him to need a cane. In this new time-frame, the communities that rose up against Negan have essentially achieved their goal of rebuilding society into a peaceful and prosperous coexistence with Rick as their leader. Rick also has a new look at that point in the comics.
The SDCC 2017 promo -- the cane, the languid music, an older Rick -- certainly hint at a similar jump ahead in time to a more peaceful era for Rick and the other survivors. (Rick sure seems far older than he might look in a mere two years time.) The show taking its cue from "A New Beginning" and jumping ahead to this brighter future would certainly help alleviate the overwhelming grimness that has alienated many viewers of the series, which saw its ratings markedly decline in Season 7.
Whether this "Old Man Rick" vignette is a fantasy or an actual time-jump will be answered sometime during Season 8 of The Walking Dead, which returns October 22nd with its 100th episode.
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