The Real Reason The Walking Dead Didn't Kill Off Carol

When asked if The Walking Dead's remaining season 1 characters are death-proof, Gimple had an intriguing response. 

"Well, anything is possible, and the attention of people nowadays is a very big deal, so you never know," he shared. "But that said, I've been over the years criticized for being so spoiler-phobic and so careful about what I'm saying, and this was a bracing departure for that, for me. But I will say that there's a huge part of the fans that get annoyed at the cards [being] so close to the vest. So, it's a tricky thing. I'll say anything's possible, but we did make that announcement, and I don't think we're going to be following a couple of walkers on that show. I think that would be weird."

Much like Daryl Dixon, Morgan Jones (Lennie James), and Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln), Carol is one of the last remaining original Walking Dead cast members who's been around since the very first season premiered in 2010. Killing off any of these fan-favorite characters off would result in severing the last remaining threads from the season that started it all. While Carol's fate is guaranteed to see her through the final season of The Walking Dead, there was actually a time when the show's writers almost plotted her demise, but Gimple was one of the strong opposers of that idea.

"The most potent one for me was early on like — jeez, season 3," said Gimple when asked if there was ever a time Carol was on the chopping block. "There was some investigation going on about killing Carol. It got pretty far down the line, and I was pretty hardcore against that because I saw her journey of going from somebody under her ex-husband's thumb to being a warrior."

It's hard to imagine what The Walking Dead would be like without one of its most compelling characters. Thankfully, Gimple shared his vision and convinced the writer's room about Carol's potential, and he ultimately had his way. 

"It just looked like the most amazing journey for our character to have, and having worked with Melissa McBride up to that point, it was like, 'Oh, well, she could do that. She can do anything,'" Gimple told Looper. "Man, I would love to look up some of the old emails or something like that because it was like, 'What if people thought she was dead, but she lived?' At that point, that was a surprise as well — people were dying and dying. It was what the show was getting a lot of noise for at that point. And it seemed even early on switching that up, but really it was more about seeing that character go through that journey because she had started out as so passive and a victim. And to see her become one of the strongest people in the story seemed exciting to me as a writer."