AMC Still Doesn't Know How 'The Walking Dead' Ends

There is currently no end in sight for AMC's The Walking Dead. Season eight has already been ordered, but earlier this year, AMC's president said they want to keep the show going as long as Robert Kirkman's comic still provides enough material. Understandably, AMC has zero interest in ending The Walking Dead at the moment, but they also don't know what the ending of the show is yet.

Robert Kirkman's black-and-white zombie comic has been hitting comic book stores since 2003. As for its insanely popular television adaptation, there's a total of 86 episodes since the series began airing in 2010. When the comic and show one day reaches the end, the endings will likely be different. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, Kirkman said showrunner Scott Gimple and AMC don't know what he has planned for The Walking Dead ending:

No, there's no communication whatsoever [about the ending]. They have no approval over what happens in the comic. Scott Gimple is an avid reader of the comic, and prefers to experience the comic book as a reader, so he gets the advance issues as they're published, but he doesn't read scripts. He gets mad at me if I give him any kind of indication as to what's coming, because he doesn't like spoilers. So, they're kind of a hundred percent in the dark, which I guess is pretty remarkable, and I would probably say it's a testament to the trust that AMC has in me. I mean, I guess to a certain extent, at this point, the comic book is kind of a workshop of future seasons of the show, and it's fun to think that I can just completely torpedo the story if I wanted to.

Kirkman, of course, knows "exactly how it ends," but he's still in the middle of telling his story:

Yeah, I know exactly how it ends, and I'm always taking baby steps toward that point as I'm telling the story. I know what the end point is, and at the end of the day, I want this entire long narrative to be a complete story with a beginning, middle, and end. We're just spending a lot of time in the middle, so, I kind of have to know what that direction is, and I have to know what that end point is to be able to keep building towards it. I think that's the only way to keep it alive.

Kirkman had stated before if the show was ever to finish before the comic does, he'd have to sit down with Scott Gimple and play dumb, pretending he has no idea how his story wraps up and then work with him on coming up with a different conclusion for the television series. But Kirkman and Gimple probably won't have to have that conversation anytime soon, though.