The Walking Dead boss Angela Kang has opened up about the “horrific” ending of the show’s last episode.
Discussing the fourth episode of season 11, ‘Rendition’, Kang explained why the head of the Reachers, Pope, pushed a Reaper into a campfire where his skin melted off, after mistakenly believing he had left another soldier to die.
“It’s pretty graphic,” Kang said of the scene, in conversation with Entertainment Weekly. “That [sic] were a lot of conversations. And I think sometimes with human violence, we try to be a little careful with it, a little more so than if it’s like zombie gore, which people love seeing.
“I think with this, because it’s a villain killing a villain, we need to show how brutal and unpredictable Pope can be. I mean, he threw this guy in the fire because he thought he didn’t do a good job protecting his friend.
“But go back and look at the episode where this incident happened. The guys were fighting and he took off with his friend. It’s just that our people bested them a little bit, you know?”
Describing Pope’s “paranoid ideas”, Kang continued: “So to get that across, we felt that ultimately it did need to be a little graphic and horrific. I personally am not shedding a lot of tears for this guy who went after our people and tried to do harm to them.”
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Kang had previously reflected on the legacy of The Walking Dead, saying the “sense of community” found in the show was “most meaningful”.
“There’s a lot of people who are like, ‘I haven’t seen somebody like me very much on TV, but I’ve seen them on the show, and it’s helped me and my family either just have more understanding or feel good about ourselves’,” she said
“And I know a lot of our fans have found community with each other as well. It’s the sense of community that is most meaningful, I think, to a lot of us that work on the show.”