After witnessing the backlash after The Walking Dead’s Season One Finale, it must have been refreshing for the cast and crew to see the positive responses towards March 18’s record-breaking Season Two finale. Could it have been the burning barn that washed away some folks’ stale memories of an exploding CDC? It might just be.
In fact, when Hollywood.com spoke with Executive Producer Gale Anne Hurd about the finale, she said, “I’ve done a lot of feature films. What we got on screen on TV last night was epic feature film quality. Without cheating.” And when she says feature films, she means things like The Terminator and Aliens, so she’s got a pretty good idea of what “epic” means.
Hurd also noted one very important factor about the pivotal scene which found a heard of zombies swarming around a flame-engulfed barn: they didn’t take a short cut. The barn it self was built on site, and it was built to one day burn: “From the beginning we knew we would burn the barn…It’s always good to have a good barn burner,” she said. But it wasn’t just the fact that the barn went up in flame on the series that was shocking, Hurd revealed that the havoc was all captured in-scene, meaning that massive fire and every moaning, drooling walker milling around it were doing the same thing in real life.
Of course, aside from the spectacle of the episode, Hurd notes that there’s another big reason people responded so positively to the end of Season Two: “We found the groove.” After using the first six episodes of the series to establish the world and “Rick’s journey” there wasn’t necessarily room for much more, “We did not have the 13 episodes that we had this year to really introduce and get to know all of the members of the survivors group,” she said.
In parting, she had two important messages for fans. First, she appreciates fans sticking around through the philosophical debates and moral questions throughout Season Two: “We promise we’d deliver, and that people’s patience would be rewarded,” she said. “We don’t want to overpromise and under deliver. I don’t think that anyone would dispute that we did deliver on these past few episodes.” Second, she delivered one big promise: the producers keep telling us no one is safe, and they mean it. “[The story] evolves organically,” she said. “No one is safe no one.”
For more, check out our midseason interview with Hurd!
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