Is This the Real Reason The Walking Dead Keeps Trying to Bump off Glenn?

There may be a very good reason this character has become the show’s punching bag.

If you haven’t already watched Sunday’s mid-season premiere of The Walking Dead then, woof, have you got an intense hour of television coming your way. We’ll be discussing some specific scenes from Season 6, Episode 9, “No Way Out” in the post below so in order to protect yourself, here’s a topical spoiler warning.

Did you really think they were going to do it? Did you thinkThe Walking Dead would spend eight or so episodes of Season 6 pulling Glenn and Maggie apart only to bump one of them off just as they were about to re-unite? Well, if you did, the show gave you ample cause for alarm. As Glenn heroically tried to draw the zombie horde away from a pregnant Maggie and her precarious perch, he wound up, once again, seemingly drowning in a sea of hungry zombies. Having gotten their attention by firing his gun into the swarm and then leaving himself defenseless by running out of bullets, Glenn disappeared from view sliding down the wall of Alexandria as the zombies overtook him.
To drown in a pile of zombies once in a season may be regarded as a misfortune; to do so twice looks like carelessness. Of course, Glenn didn’t die. He was saved inanother unbelievable way when Abraham, Sasha, and Daryl arrived with all the assault weapons you could dream of. Glenn will live another day. . .for now.
So what is this all about? Glenn—like most of our heroes—has had several narrow escapes but why is he suddenly theKenny McCormick of The Walking Dead? There’s actually a very good reason but it involves a comic book spoiler. So here, again, is another warning.

If you’ve read the comic books or, in the heat of the Gleen Rhee roller coaster from the first half of the season, spoiled yourself as to the fate of our favorite pizza delivery boy, then you know Glenn is probably going to die. And given that it’sJeffrey Dean Morgan’s character Negan who kills Glenn off in the comics and Negan is slated to make a splashy entrance in the Season 6 finale, then it’s very likely we only have seven more episode to go until Glenn leaves the show for real.
So it’s possible that the show, in order to fake everyone out, is taking a boy-who-cried-wolf approach to Glenn. That is to say, if an unspoiled viewer watches Glenn almost die over and over again, maybe they’ll believe he’s a quasi-invincible character who is too popular to be killed off. So when it actually happens, some audiences won’t see it coming.
There are still a lot of other options for how the show plans to get around the worst-kept comic book secret of The Walking Dead. There are some rumors that either Maggie or Daryl will take Glenn’s place on the business end of Negan’s baseball bat. But tonight’s gruesome episode played outpretty much as it did on the page. In other words, The Walking Dead seems to be hewing close to the text and maybe their only hope of surprising us is to fake us out one too many times. So enjoy those 11th hour rescues while they last, Glenn fans.