‘Andrew Lincoln: 7B of The Walking Dead has ‘thrill of the fight’
By Susie Graham
When we return to The Walking Dead in February, we may not have just a different feel, but the opposite of what we had in the first half of the season.
It’s no secret that we have a reinvention of some sort every 8 episodes on The Walking Dead. Sometimes its tone or location, new characters or loss of characters, but there’s always some sort of new direction to the story telling.
This season promises a dramatic shift in tone from the first half of the season to the second half. In the first half of the season, we watched our group crush under the weight of Negan and the grief of the loss of Abraham and Glenn and everything they had fought to gain as a family over the last 2 years.
It was difficult to watch for us as an audience. Our characters fought to figure out how to handle their grief and struggled with how to lean on each other. Finally, at the end of the season, they found each other again.
The midseason finale left fans cheering with hope and ready for the fight to come. Andrew Lincoln’s words to Entertainment Weekly should have fans even more excited for February.
"There’s a lot more levity, if you can believe that, than you’ve ever seen before in Mr. Grimes. There’s sort of a freedom in him, a feeling that comes from losing everything, and also the thrill of the fight. It’s the thrill of the fight again. He’s back in. All I’m saying is that the band is back together.It’s probably the opposite of what you just witnessed. Certainly from Rick’s point of view. You see a man in action again with some of the members of his closest family.There are several episodes that I loved being involved in and it certainly feels very much more like a show that I knew and recognized in the back eight. I loved the episodes that I was in.It’s The Magnificent Seven in the back half. Rather, the magnificent eight episodes. Wait till [episode] 16. I promise you, there is one beat in 16, I dropped my script and started punching the air and did a little jig."
A little jig! If that’s not enough to get you excited about February 12th, I don’t know what would. Andrew Lincoln dropped his script, started punching the air and did a little jig.
Remember that when we get to the season 7 finale! We have to see if we can figure out what that moment was that made him do that and see if we punch the air and do a jig in our living rooms.
But let’s not get too far ahead of ourselves. We don’t want the season finale yet. We just want February 12th and then somehow a time trick where we always have Sundays of new The Walking Dead episodes.