Dr. Jenner: The Walking Dead’s Noah Emmerich returns
By Renee Hansen
If you are a fan of The Walking Dead universe, you have no doubt heard about and/or watched a bonus scene at the end of The Walking Dead: World Beyond’s series finale. This scene is a hot topic within the fandom, and everyone has their ideas about what this means for the TWDU.
The scene brings back a familiar face from season one of the flagship series. In season one, episode 6, “TS-19,” Rick and company headed to the CDC, where they met Dr. Edwin Jenner (Noah Emmerich). They were disheartened to learn he was the sole remaining doctor left at the CDC who they heard rumors were searching for a cure.
In the bonus scene from World Beyond, we saw old videos of Jenner being downloaded onto a laptop. Although these videos showed Jenner many years ago, the footage was actually filmed recently. Noah Emmerich came back to the fandom to film this footage; it is always cool when past characters return for a flashback.
Dr. Edwin Jenner The Walking Dead
Jenner talked about variants the French had discovered and that the US hadn’t seen anything like that. Soon after, we see a French scientist shot and reanimate into what looks like a variant walker. This walker seems faster and perhaps stronger than anything we’ve seen before. It also appears she was shot in the head but still reanimated.
According to Jenner, in season one, the French were the last holdouts, and they thought they were close to a solution. The dialogue in this scene makes it seem like something went wrong, and they instead created a variant.
Fans have thought the phrase “les morts sont nes ici,” translated to “the dead were born here,” means the virus started in France. But, after remembering a comment from Jenner and reading a statement by Scott Gimple, I wonder if only this variant was “born” there.
Jenner stated that 194 days since Wildfire was declared and 63 days since the outbreak went global.
Gimple said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, “I guess I would say, don’t just flatly believe everything you read scrolled in paint. That might be true, but I wouldn’t say it’s true because it’s painted.”
If the virus struck the US first then went global, it couldn’t have originated in France. And, in Gimple’s truly dizzying comment, to keep us off the trail, perhaps what we see painted on the duct in the bonus scene is true but only for the variant walkers.
It will be exciting to see what comes of this variant information, and it was great to have Noah Emmerich back as Dr. Jenner in this scene.
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