Scott Gimple Says The Walking Dead Nearly Killed Carol in Season Three

During a new interview, The Walking Dead CCO Scott Gimple says that Carol nearly didn’t survive past the third season. Gimple spoke at the AMC Network Summit earlier this week (per Insider.com) and said that there was discussion of writing Melissa McBride’s character out of the show during the prison-set season.

“[In] season three, there was some conversation about maybe Carol going away [by being killed off],” Gimple said Monday in response to a question by the site about the changes made to Carol’s story from the source material. “I was dead set against it. because I thought it would be a great story to see a person who came from abuse become the hero, and not in an easy way. She herself had to struggle with the power that she found.”

Executive producer Greg Nicotero previously discussed the topic, having told SFX a few years back that the original plan would have been to kill Carol instead of T-Dog. He noted, “At that point there was some concern in the writers’ room that they didn’t know where to take her character. So the fact that Scott Gimple and the writers have been able to craft this amazing journey for her just goes to show that there is a tremendous amount of story to tell for a lot of these characters.”

Gimple added of Carol, “Carol’s greatest story is that she found that she was strong. She found she had this superpower, but that it wouldn’t be easy. It wasn’t a little happy ever after after that. She had responsibility and there was a weight to that strength that she had. To tell people that they can be that is definitely one of the great gifts of being able to tell stories like that. Anybody can become a hero.”