The Walking Dead’s eighth season will focus more on reunions

One of the biggest complaints people had with The Walking Dead’s seventh season was how the show spent too much time drifting between different camps and locations.

[Warning: The following contains spoilers for the seventh season of The Walking Dead and possibly for the eighth.]

The seventh season spent a large chunk of its time checking in on four different communities — if you include the Saviors — and that non-linear storytelling method was disappointing to more than a few fans.

“The entire plot of season seven can be boiled down to this: Our Alexandrians are unhappy being subjugated by the Saviors,” Eric Watson wrote in a piece for Polygon. “They try to unite the communities around them, mostly failing. Negan and the Saviors are jerks. Our group finds some guns. A fight between Rick and the gang with the Saviors finally breaks out. That's about it, yet it took 16 episodes, and many of those longer than 60 minutes to tell.”

Showrunner Scott M. Gimple and other producers on The Walking Dead team are aware of how people feel about the sporadic, slower paced season the show went through. When people were reunited in the finale, it was a sign of what’s to come.

“The season finale last year, seeing all the characters together interacting as one, was thrilling,” Gimple told Entertainment Weekly. “It was exciting to see all these configurations of characters we hadn’t seen before.”

“This is that times a million.”

The Walking Dead is about to engage in one of the biggest battles yet as Rick and his gang gear up to take on Negan. This season should hopefully be faster paced, with more action and attention paid to a group effort instead of just individual storylines. More information is expected to be released during San Diego Comic-Con, which runs from July 20 through 23.

The Walking Dead returns for its eighth season this fall.