Walking Dead Confirms How Many Years Have Passed In TWD Timeline
The Walking Dead has finally confirmed how many years have passed since the zombie apocalypse finally began; apparently, the world fell apart around 12 years ago. The reveal came in the long-awaited origin story episode for one of its most popular characters, Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan).
It’s not often at all that the AMC series takes a trip to the past, but flashbacks were a major focal point of The Walking Dead season 10, episode 22, “Here’s Negan”. In fact, the show even featured a look at the world before the zombie virus outbreak happened. This was done to give viewers its first full taste of who the leader of the Saviors used to be. As it turned out, he was an ex-gym teacher struggling to find work, while also engaging in an affair with one of his wife’s friends. One of his biggest problems was that he had a potentially violent temper, which he had to keep a leash on. But when the zombie apocalypse kicked off and his wife died from cancer, Negan stripped away his inhibitions and became a villain.
The flashbacks gave a clear timeframe for when these tragic events occurred in Negan’s life, and they also helped to shed some light on when season 10 takes place in regards to the show’s timeline. The sequence about Negan being beaten up by a criminal was set 12 years ago. At this point, zombies were already everywhere. Then, the show went back six weeks to him trying to help Lucille (Hillarie Burton Morgan) with her cancer treatments while also trying to keep their home safe from the walkers outside. Later, A flashback to a moment in Lucille’s life from seven months ago showed the two living together prior to the apocalypse. This confirms that the characters in the show have been fighting for their lives against the zombies between 12 and 13 years now.
When looking back at other time skips and rather accurate records that fans have composed, this figure isn’t all that surprising. The first several seasons played out across a somewhat brief period of time, and it wasn’t until much later that the series started delivering large time jumps, the biggest of which being the one that happened early in The Walking Dead season 9, which leaped forward by six years.
Regardless, it’s interesting that it took until the last episode before the show’s eleventh and final season for it to nail down a specific timeframe for when everything began. Up until now, it was a bit more open to interpretation. The biggest clues were found by looking at the aging of characters like Carl, and adding up all the specified time skips that have transpired thus far. These things had to be examined because how long this has been going on is never something that’s been discussed by the characters (likely due to the fact that days and months have little importance in a post-apocalyptic world). All things considered, it’s good that Walking Dead fans don’t have to rely on unofficial timelines anymore.