The Walking Dead's Lauren Cohan Breaks Down Maggie's Surprising Choices in the Season 11B Premiere

[Warning: The following contains spoilers for the Season 11B premiere of The Walking Dead. Read at your own risk!]

The Walking Dead's Season 11B premiere, "No Other Way," was a major episode for Maggie Rhee (Lauren Cohan). Maggie resolved — for now — her two most vexing problems. The first was her ongoing battle with the Reapers, the masked cultists who had been terrorizing her people since they'd been in Meridian before. In that conflict, she welched on a deal that would have allowed her people and the surviving Reapers to walk away from the fight with their lives and instead killed the Reapers in cold blood. Rather than give the Reapers the opportunity to attack her people again, Maggie shot them in the back. Leah (Lynn Collins) was injured during the rampage, but she survived and escaped the scene, so we probably haven't seen the last of her. And she's going to be as angry at Maggie for killing her people as Maggie is at Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) for killing hers. 

As for her long-simmering tension with Negan — the man she cannot drop her grudge against for what he did to her husband Glenn (Steven Yeun) — he resolved it for her by choosing to leave the community. After he saw how she broke her word to the Reapers, he doesn't believe that she won't kill him if she gets the chance, even though she said she wouldn't. 

Lauren Cohan said that what Negan told Maggie in Episode 7, that he regrets not killing all of the Alexandrians when he had the chance, not just Glenn and Abraham (Michael Cudlitz), was a big influence on Maggie's decision to use the nuclear option. "That's no joke," Cohan told TV Guide. "And it's completely plausible that the Reapers would have just then tracked them as they walked away." So while some members of Maggie's community might think Maggie did something bad by killing people who had surrendered, Cohan doesn't think it's that simple. In her view, Maggie has seen everyone she cares about killed or threatened — "And I just mean recently everybody that [she] cares about, let alone 10 years of everybody [she] cares about," Cohan said — so it's not unreasonable for her to break her word to an enemy she doesn't trust and strike so hard in order to protect herself and the people she loves. Maggie is not the same person she used to be, but she might be who she needs to be to keep surviving. "I don't think it's cut and dry," Cohan said.

The conflict between who Maggie was and who Maggie is now is exemplified in her reaction to the death of Alden (Callan McAuliffe), who had been injured in a fight with the Reapers earlier in the season and left behind at his own request while Maggie went off to secure the food supply. When she returned to the church where he was sheltering, he was already dead, and she had to put him down. When Maggie met Alden years before, he was a Savior, but she was able to overcome her distrust of him after he defected and they became close friends. He put his faith in her as a leader back then, and the last time he spoke to her, he told her he still believes in her to do the right thing. "He ends up in this story being this very important reminder to Maggie about who she is," Cohan said. "And I think that when she returns to the church and he's gone, it's some sort of fateful bell tolling that a part of her is gone." 

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"I think every time you lose someone or you say goodbye to something, part of the sadness of those things is the fear that the memory dies with them," Cohan said. "And I think that the parts of self that [Alden] saw in her maybe weren't the parts of self that she just demonstrated, killing the Reapers."

The episode ended with a time jump six months into the future. Maggie was back at a still-destroyed Hilltop, and a Commonwealth soldier was trying to get her to open the gate and let him and his platoon inside. "It doesn't have to be this way," she told him. "Yes it does," he answered, taking off his helmet to reveal that he's Daryl Dixon (Norman Reedus). 

"That's really gonna throw people for a loop, I hope," Cohan said. "That's scary stuff, to see these two people that have basically been brother and sister not on the same side, as it appears in that episode." She's looking forward to people finding out what caused this rift between Maggie and Daryl and seeing where everyone is at in this six-month time jump. 

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Cohan said that The Walking Dead still has a few episodes left to film before it wraps for good. Working on the show in its final year has been a "magical" experience, and she's still digesting the fact that the show that's been part of her life for over a decade is coming to an end. "I mean, so many of us don't do a regular job for 11 years, let alone an acting role for that long, and get an opportunity to build with people for that long," she said. "That's really the exciting part of it. And luckily, the same thing that makes it sad is the thing that makes it OK, because you're leaving people you love but when you love people, they never leave you. So I've had just, honestly, a phenomenal year here. We've all had just such an amazing last season." 

She said that the cast and crew are focused on making sure the ending is special. "Knowing when something's ending gives you such an opportunity to appreciate it the way that you would if you knew it was ending," she said. "That's kind of the gist of it. It's made us very present." She said she gets "strange flashbacks," like the way the wind moves on a certain set will remind her of a time she was there before, or how a previous filming location gets repurposed for something else but she remembers the things the characters went through in that exact spot the last time, "and the smells, and the Georgia of everything, and the sounds of the bugs and the bites of the bugs." 

"I don't know, it's like a living yearbook right now," she said. "You just kind see things in snapshots sometimes and you know that you've had an opportunity of a lifetime." 

Watch The Walking Dead Season 11 Now streaming on AMC+