"In the script, it doesn't say that he's good. It says that Glenn is being torn apart."
Season 6's "Thank You" episode of The Walking Dead had viewers down in the dumps after fan-favorite Glenn (Steven Yeun) was shockingly killed off as the victim of a zombie horde. Except Glenn didn't die. While it appeared that Glenn was eaten alive after climbing on top of a dumpster with Nicholas (Michael Traynor) — who shot himself in the head to avoid such a fate — the dumpster dive was a fake-out.
As it turned out, the guts we saw being torn out belonged to Nicholas — not Glenn. A month-long cliffhanger and four episodes later, the opening minutes of "Heads Up" revealed that Nicholas fell on top of Glenn when they tumbled into the swarm of walkers... giving Glenn time to slide under a dumpster as Nicholas was devoured.
"When I got the script for ['Thank You'], usually we got a pretty big heads up if an actor is going to be leaving us. We'd find out multiple episodes in advance, or months in advance sometimes. For this one, we got no heads up," Chandler Riggs, who played Carl Grimes for the first eight seasons, said during a panel at Nickle City Comic Con. "It's Glenn with the dumpster. And in the script, it doesn't say that he's good. It says that Glenn is being torn apart."
"I remember reading that and being like, 'What?! Not yet! We're not there yet,'" Riggs continued, referring to Glenn's comic book death in The Walking Dead issue #100.
Michael Traynor as Nicholas and Steven Yeun as Glenn Rhee – The Walking Dead _ Season 6, Episode 3 – Photo Credit: Gene Page/AMC
- Gene Page/AMC)Asked if fans might have had a different reaction to the dumpster scene if Glenn died for real, Riggs said, "It's a tough thing because when you're a fan of a show and you're supporting it, you don't want to be lied to or faked out. I feel like there were some cases where there were not super necessary fake-outs and kind of tricking the fans. Like 'I got you!' Just for the sake of 'gotcha' and not tell you for, like, five weeks until the next episode comes out."
After the Angela Kang-penned episode aired, then-showrunner Scott M. Gimple issued a statement on Talking Dead that hinted there was more to Glenn's fate. "In some way, we will see Glenn, some version of Glenn or parts of Glenn again, either in flashback or in the current story to help complete the story," Gimple's statement read. A few weeks later, Gimple appeared on the aftershow to explain that the uncertainty around whether Glenn was alive or dead was so audiences could feel "the exact same way" as Maggie (Lauren Cohan), who wondered when — or if — her husband would return.
"The story we were telling was one of uncertainty," Gimple said at the time. "When people leave the walls — in this case of Alexandria — they don't have cell phones. They aren't rocking '80s beepers. You don't know what happens. You have no idea. When they leave, that could be the last time you see them. And I think it was important to do a story this year about uncertainty, and the audience would share that uncertainty that the characters had, like in episode 5. Maggie didn't know what happened to Glenn, and I wanted the audience to be exactly where she was, to feel the exact same way."
