It can’t be easy to be the showrunner for one of these big, narrative-based series like Game Of Thrones or The Walking Dead. Imagine it: you go to all the effort to set up a big, season-ending cliffhanger—maybe too much effort, in some cases—and then a 12-year-old with a smartphone snaps a picture of Kit Harrington waving a sword around and all your carefully laid plans fall to crap.
Walking Dead producer Greg Nicotero is apparently trying to get out ahead of all the snoopers, though, suggesting in a recent IGN interview that the production has taken steps to obfuscate who lives and dies on the show. Nicotero hinted that he and his crew have shot at least some of the show’s seventh season intentionally out of order, a move that’ll make it harder to guess who got used as a T-ball by new bad guy Negan in the sixth season finale. (It also means the schedule might be able to accommodate Steven Yeun filming a movie in South Korea this year without the show killing Glenn off again.)
Of course, it’s also possible that Nicotero is employing a different information-hiding tactic, one that David Benioff and D.B. Weiss used a lot over on Game Of Thrones this year: lying his damn head off. Certainly, reports have been swirling that certain cast members—Uproxx lists them here, if you’re going spoiler hunting—have been absent from the set, once again reminding us that TV studios have yet to come up with a lightless, soundproofed box that they can film their shows in to keep those prying eyes away.