Season 5 of "The Walking Dead" kicks off in October and Entertainment Weekly sat down with executive producer - and Walking Dead comic book creator - Robert Kirkman to see if he knew how and when the series would end.
Kirkman explained that the TV series could last a really long time because there's so much material it could pull from the comics. He just released comic book issue #130, while the show is still on issue #60-something.
"Luckily, because of the comic series, this isn't a show where we're going to run out of ideas," Kirkman said. "This isn't a show where it's going to be, like, 'Well, they're clearly spinning their wheels just to keep the show going.' It's much more a matter of: Are we going to have enough seasons to get enough of the comic books into the show? I think that's more the struggle for us. That's what we're hoping to find out in the next few years."
As far as the comic book's ending, Kirkman said he knows exactly how he wants to wrap up the zombie apocalypse. Will all the main characters be killed? Will there finally be a cure for the outbreak? Maybe the characters will learn how to live in a world with zombies, and it will a happily-ever-after type of feel?
Of course, Kirkman didn't divulge any details but told EW that he came up with the idea about two years ago.
"I do know what I'm building towards, yes," Kirkman said, referring to the comics. "I don't know exactly what issue that's going to fall on, per se, and I do have a lot of road laid out before that that is going to take a long time, but I certainly know exactly what I'm building to."
He even said he has an idea of how the very last page of the comic would play out.
"From the very beginning I would always plot these big, long overreaching stories," he said. "So it'd be like, oh, they're going to get to the prison, then this is going to happen and then that's going to happen and that's going to happen. I wouldn't really map out how many issues those were going to take, but I would always make sure that I had somewhere between two and ten years of story mapped out ahead of me."
"About a year or two ago, I finally nailed it down exactly what I want the ending to be," Kirkman added. "So now I've kind of got two trails of story going in my head. One working to where I'm at very far into the future, and one working from the end backwards. When these two stories meet, then I'll know exactly how long the story is. I'm rapidly approaching that point."
Season 5 of "The Walking Dead" premieres Sunday, Oct. 12 on AMC.
How do you think Robert Kirkman should end the series?
