Is Glenn really dead?

For Glenn fans who follow “The Walking Dead”, this is surely the question they have been asking themselves for a week now:

Is Glenn really dead?

I was shocked myself watching the episode called “Thank You”, in which Glenn, one of the main characters, seems to be torn apart by a pack of zombies. But is that really what happened?

Let’s take it step by step: Glenn and Nicholas leave the group to create a diversion and distract a gigantic herd of zombies threatening Michonne and the others. Unfortunately they find themselves surrounded by the walking dead and trapped in an alley, where their only hope seems to be a dumpster they climb onto.

The scene is chilling, Glenn and Nicholas alone on a dumpster surrounded by zombies as far as the eye can see, my heart is racing, but then I think: “OK, now there’ll be a shot and the zombies will be distracted”. But nothing.

At this point Nicholas, seeing no way out, says “Thank you” to Glenn, takes his own life with his gun and falls onto Glenn, dragging him to the ground.

Glenn in the next season

What we see is a close-up of Glenn screaming in despair and all the zombies throwing themselves on him, tearing out his guts… but is that really so?

As soon as I saw the scene I thought the intestines the walking dead were feasting on weren’t anatomically in the right place. They seemed to be coming out of Glenn’s chest, not his belly.

So I thought maybe Nicholas’s body had fallen on top of him, acting as a human shield. The episode ends shortly after, showing nothing more of Glenn. And that’s where the doubts began: is he dead or not?

Even if Nicholas had acted as a human shield, with that many zombies it wouldn’t take long before they finished with him and started on Glenn.

So our likeable character would be doomed, unless something spectacular happens to distract the mass of walking dead and lets Glenn somehow escape.

The theories

After all, the actor who plays him, Steven Yeun, did not appear on the talk show “Talking Dead”, which airs after the series and usually features the actors whose characters have died on TWD.

Many take this as a sign that Glenn is still alive. Photos have also been released of the actor on set with Rick and Jesus, a character who will only appear in the second half of this season.

But is it really him, or was he on set as someone’s hallucination, maybe Maggie’s, his supposed widow?

After all, in the comic “The Walking Dead” Glenn also dies, though not in the same way. And despite some differences, the series follows the general plot of the comic.

In short, to find out the truth we’ll have to wait at least until tomorrow. Hope dies last!

Update: how it ended

I was right to hope! In the episode “Heads Up”, a few weeks later, we discover that Glenn had managed to crawl under the dumpster while the zombies devoured Nicholas’s body, and stayed hidden there until the herd moved on. Soon after he meets Enid and returns with her to Alexandria, to Maggie, who meanwhile has revealed she is expecting his child.

Unfortunately his luck didn’t last long. In the first episode of season seven, “The Day Will Come When You Won’t Be”, aired in October 2016, Glenn is beaten to death with a baseball bat by Negan, in front of Maggie and the whole group, just as in the comic. After the first blows he still manages to murmur Maggie’s name, promising he would find her. One of the most brutal and debated scenes of the whole series, which enraged many fans.

Sources

• Wikipedia, Glenn Rhee