Forgoing its typically laid-back approach of people hacking ambulatory corpses limb from limb in a desperate struggle to survive, The Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman has said that the show’s sixth season will be its “most intense” yet. Appearing at a panel for the show at New York Comic-Con, the comic-book author and executive producer assured fans that the start of the new season would be packed with cliffhangers, although he was cagey when it came to the particulars of the actual cliffs.
When questioned about whether rival communities to the relatively idyllic haven of Alexandria would show up this year, Kirkman threw the question to the crowd, who enthusiastically yelled that yeah, they’d like to see that, because it’s Comic-Con, and yelling enthusiastically is what people do. He was less democratic about whether ultra-violent comic book dictator Negan would appear this year, though, simply saying, “I think it’d be cool for Negan to be introduced into the show, I don’t know when that’ll happen. I mean, I do, but I can’t tell you.” (Because if he did, he’d have to kill you, because that’s what it means to be intense.)
Kirkman was able to reveal that Lennie James’ character Morgan would play a prominent role this season—which the trailers for the season have already made pretty clear—and mentioned that Lauren Cohan’s Maggie would be taking on a leadership role as the episodes progressed. So it’s possible that one of those big cliffhangers will involve a small-scale municipal election, the most intense of all the small-town bureaucratic processes. Fans will need to buckle their seatbelts and sharpen their voting styluses, because The Walking Dead returns on October 11.