The Walking Dead is starting to ramp up promotion for season 9 ahead of its October release and more pressingly, SDCC, where the first trailer for season 9 will likely be revealed.
I was not expecting so much to be revealed in a new poster, but other than some snazzy new haircuts (Rick with short hair! Maggie with long hair! Daryl….the same), we are seeing not only the return the fabled helicopter from season 8, but the appearance of the ravaged Capitol building, implying a huge setting change for the show, and a potentially wild departure from the comics.
I googled a few local state capitol buildings in Virginia, West Virginia and Georgia before I realized that yes, this really is the Capitol Building in DC. In this shot it looks Fallout-level ravaged, so that does not exactly bode well for the current state of DC, but that’s not really the key point.
If The Walking Dead is heading to Washington DC in any capacity, that is a huge departure from the comics, and signifies that it’s possible that the TV is probably breaking with the source material, at least for a spell.
Washington DC only comes up very briefly in the comics where Glenn scouts it out to find that it’s just as bad as anywhere else, and it’s only mentioned as a possible location to travel after the prison falls for a bit, before the group eventually goes to the Alexandria safe zone instead. And Eugene’s original plan was to go do DC to find a cure, but that was all a part of his lie to stay alive, and we don’t really have any idea who is in DC, including what semblance of the federal government or military might be left there
If The Walking Dead heads to DC, that would indeed be more in line with the promise that under new showrunner Angela Kang, the show would be more like seasons 4 and 5 again, the “good old days.” In those seasons we also saw big departures from the comics, though eventually the show returned to the source material for the Negan War.
This trip to DC seems like another “side quest” as it were, a detour from the source material that implies that we may be delaying the arrival of the Whisperers, the next comic villain group, if not abandoning them altogether. Given that The Walking Dead has killed off Carl, arguably the most important fixture in the Whisperer war, it stands to reason that maybe the entire plotline is being shelved in favor of something more interesting.
It’s also possible we’re about to connect some dots. If there is a group of some sort to be discovered in DC (and there has to be, it’s not just going to be zombies and nothing else), my guess is that it would connect to the Jadis/helicopter plotline of season 8. Not just because it’s a loose thread, but the helicopter also appears on the damn poster right next to the capitol, which is a fairly obvious hint.
