The Walking Dead Series Finale Brought Back Unexpected Characters
The commercials that aired during The Walking Dead series finale featured a number of former cast members from the series.
Fewer shows have done more for a genre than The Walking Dead did for zombies, and the finale has been one of the most sadly anticipated in recent memory. Of course, if you have been a fan from the beginning, you likely saw a plethora of familiar faces in the form of cameos in a string of commercials called The Walking Deadvertising. Airing during the series finale were four commercials featuring some of the long-dead characters, including Gareth, Milton, Rodney, and Andrea.
Rodney (Joe Ando-Hirsh) appeared in Season 9 as a member of the Hilltop community; he was an immature and sometimes foolish member due mainly to his youth and not malice. Alpha caught the young member, and his head was removed and put on a spike to mark the borders between the communities and The Whisperer’s land. During The Walking Dead Finale, Rodney appeared as a severed head ordering Doordash, a fun throwback to his death and eventual reanimated head.
Milton (Dallas Roberts) appeared in Season 3 as the close confidant of the primary antagonist, The Governor. He began to rebel against the leader and warned Andrea about him, only to indirectly cause his own demise, leading to Andrea being forced to put him down after his reanimation. During The Walking Dead Finale, his appearance in The Walking Deadvertising featured him as a researcher, a callback to his character’s job in Woodbury, giving a DED Talk (instead of a TED Talk) and presenting a grunt-powered door handle.
Gareth (Andrew J. West) was a secondary antagonist in Season 4 and a primary antagonist in Season 5; he was a cunning and devious man with a sarcastic sense of humor and resorted to cannibalism to survive. He met his end at the hands of The Walking Dead‘s primary protagonist, Rick Grimes, in the third episode of Season 5. In his commercial during The Walking Dead Finale, he praises Ring for allowing him to see who is at his door before opening it, saying humans are worse than walkers; he even says he’d rather die again than answer the door.
Andrea (Laurie Holden) is one of the original survivors at the camp outside of Atlanta, having engaged in relationships with Jon Bernthal‘s Shane and The Governor. The relationship with The Governor eventually leads to her death as she is bound in the room with an infected Milton, who bites her and causes her to end her own life to avoid turning. In her The Walking Deadvertising commercial during the finale, she is the CEO of a company asking for people to donate their brains to nourish innovators.
The final commercial shows that this was a collaboration with Mint Mobile, a company owned and operated by Ryan Reynolds. As the last of the commercials aired, it showed a zombie talking about how they know MNTN Performance TV works is by eating Ryan Reynold’s brain. Of course, Ryan Reynolds was never in The Walking Dead, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t capable of showing up during the finale to shamelessly pitch his products once again.
