SPOILERS AHEAD!
Seriously, if you’re not caught up with the latest season of The Walking Dead you should absolutely stop reading here. You’ve been warned.
Now that that’s out of the way — W.T.F? Last night’s episode of TWD was perhaps the most gut-wrenching episode in the show’s history — keeping in mind half of Alexandria was hacked to death by “The Wolves” in the penultimate episode. Not only did Michonne, Dr. Dre Heath and the other lesser known Alexandrians only narrowly escape a horde of walkers, but Rick almost got taken out by the remaining Wolves and is now trapped in a RV surrounded by walkers. As if the episode wasn’t tense enough, Glenn, a cast veteran and fan favorite presumably met his end on the episode. But did he really?
Glenn’s death, if he is in fact dead, would be the most blindsiding plot twist, second only to the beheading of Hershel at the hands of The Governor. Unlike Hershel, however, there’s room for speculation as to whether Glenn actually was killed. For example, when Nicholas (who is ABSOLUTELY dead) shot himself, and Glenn reached for him causing lose his own balance and falling into the zombie horde, Nicholas was very visibly on top of him. It’s very possible they are removing Nicholas’ entrails and not Glenn’s (re-watch the scene below.)
It is also worth mentioning that during TWD’s follow up show, Talking Dead, Glenn was left out of their “In Memoriam” montage. In fact, the show’s host Chris Hardwick was given this to read to the audience and viewers from showrunner Scott M. Gimple:
Dear fans of The Walking Dead, this is a hard story to tell, and when we were planning to tell it, we knew our friends over at Talking Dead would be talking to you about it, and knowing you’d talking and feeling and commiserating, I knew we should say something about it, lest our silence say something we didn’t mean to say or not say so I will say this. In some way, we will see Glenn, some version of Glenn or parts of Glenn again, either in flashback, or current story, to help complete the story.
So this is at least confirmation that last night’s episode was not the last we’ll see of Steven Yeun as “Glenn” on the show.
If Glenn is beneath Nicholas, and did survive, he’s got his work cut out for him. Not only does he have to get Nicholas from on top of him to escape, he’s backed against a gate with countless walkers on either side of it. There’s not very many options to assure his safe escape. One particularly favorable theory floating around the Internet, is that the blood from Nicholas’ body will cloak Glenn allowing for his escape. We just hope he survives.