Dead Men Walking

The Walking Dead Just Made a Heartbreaking Script Change to Honor Glenn

A sentimental tweak to a comic book story line proves the show is still holding on to Glenn.
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Courtesy of AMC

This post covers details of Season 7, Episode 5 of The Walking Dead, titled “Go Getters.” If you’re not caught up with the current episode, now is the time to lumber away in search of other brain food.

The writers on The Walking Dead know exactly how important the Maggie and Glenn relationship is to their audience. It’s likely why they gave Glenn more romantic final words in the show than the (understandably) incoherent “M—M—M—MAGGIE” he got in the comics. “I will find you,” Steven Yeun’s dying hero managed to get out as his life was snuffed out on screen.

At the time, The Walking Dead showrunner Scott Gimple said he was “looking for a way to break the audience”—and it would appear he’s not done trying. This week’s episode focused on Maggie (Lauren Cohan) and Sasha’s (Sonequa Martin) attempts to take refuge at (and potentially set up a new life in) the Hilltop Colony. The major conflict there (as it is in the comics) is the Colony’s current leader: Gregory (Xander Berkeley). After he nearly gives Maggie and Sasha up to the Saviors (and steals the watch that once belonged to both Maggie’s dad Hershel Greene and Glenn, off of Glenn’s grave, no less), Maggie punches him—just as she does in the comics.

And just as she does in the comics, she takes that moment to assert her identity. But while she gives her maiden name—“Maggie Greene”—in the comics, in the show, Cohan says “Maggie Rhee,” in memory of her dead husband.

What’s especially fascinating about that tiny tweak is that Maggie and Glenn are much more formally married on the page than they ever were on-screen. In the books, they got a real wedding ceremony and everything.

In the show, we see Glenn propose to Maggie at the end of Season 3. By Season 4, he’s referring to her as his wife. Back in 2014, Yeun explained the situation to comicbook.com:

I think the wedding was when I passed her the ring. And that’s what was so simple about that moment in Season Three, was that it’s not about doing this whole massive wedding or getting down on one knee or making something so overly romanticized. The world that they live in is so dark and bleak and they don’t know if they’re going to survive the next day and for them, that one moment was a mutual understanding and a mutual agreement to say, this ring represents something but even without this, we’re together. And if that means we’re married regardless of whether some ceremony exists or we’re notarized by some public official [laughs], it's just that we’re together.

So this, then, was the entirety of the on-screen wedding between the most popular couple on the most popular show on television. Pretty fascinating.

Yeun went on to explain: “I think him referring to her as his wife is such the right statement—regardless of whatever pomp and circumstantial tradition exists in the old world, we don’t live in that old world anymore. This new world is, I agree to be with you for the rest of my life, and that’s what it’s going to be.”

Of course, we know now (and some knew back then!) that while Maggie and Glenn were together for the rest of his short life, their marriage didn’t last all of hers. So it’s lovely for the writers to put in this reminder that Maggie still very much considers herself married to her deceased husband. Like most of the heartbroken Walking Dead fandom, she’s holding on tight to the memory of Glenn Rhee.