How The Walking Dead will get back to its best in season 7B premiere

The wait is almost over. With one week until The Walking Dead is back on our screens, the hype machine kicks back into overdrive. If you haven’t already noticed, the cast and crew of the world’s favourite zombie TV drama are very good at getting audiences psyched up for what they have in store on the show after every break.

This season is no different, except that the people behind the show are just a little bit more desperate to win back any of those fans who have walked away since Negan arrived on the scene. Andrew Lincoln has promised things will be different in the second half of season 7 and now Greg Nicotero the gory make-up guru, executive producer and director of the season 7B premiere is talking up the return of the gang, promising in an interview with Entertainment Weekly that ‘there’s an action sequence that I devised that is pretty stupendous and very exciting’.

Nicotero is also the man who directed the season 7 premiere that had some of the goriest, most vicious, brutal and upsetting violence of the entire series so far. Let’s hope he’s got his happy hat on again and he doesn’t mean that this is going to be an action scene that involves several beloved cast members getting their faces eaten off or heads battered in with a spiky baseball bat named Lucille.

That would be a cruel way to follow up the mid-season finale though, and it’s unlikely we’ll be seeing anyone getting killed off just yet. The final episode of season 7A offered us long-suffering fans a beautiful ray of hope as Rick, Daryl, Maggie and other members of the old gang reunited and made the decision that it was time to take a stand to Negan.

So how will the season premiere get The Walking Dead back on form? Well apart from that action scene Nicotero is shouting about, he also thinks the premiere has a lot more to offer in terms of story. Nicotero says ‘I think episode nine is one of the best of the season… in terms of storytelling, in terms of performances, in terms of audience expectations of seeing the band back together and putting our group back on their feet again.’ Feel free to have a little quiet cheer at this point.

Not only that, but Nicotero promises that we are building to what he calls ‘an absolutely thrilling finale’. But that’s eight episodes away so let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Nicotero even mentions the magic word, the word that many have found sorely missing since Negan rocked the world of The Walking Dead: ‘fun’. Yes that’s correct, he says the premiere is ‘very exciting and quite a bit of fun’. No more squashed heads for a while then I suspect.

Sound good? Well Nicotero hopes so, saying ‘I’m very excited… I can’t wait for people to see it.’ Neither can we Mr Nicotero, neither can we.

What do you think? Is a little fun just what we need right now, or would you rather see the gang getting their game faces on and taking out Negan immediately?