The Walking Dead: World Beyond is taking the zombie drama franchise in a different direction when it arrives on AMC sometime early this year. The series takes place roughly 10 years into the zombie apocalypse, which puts it around the same time that the 10th season of The Walking Dead would be taking place after the show’s most recent time jump. Does that mean we could be looking at some kind of crossover with the main series? The Walking Dead chief content officer Scott M. Gimple recently discussed the possibility of seeing the new spin-off running into the primary series and how all the shows are connected.

In case you haven’t seen it, you should watch the trailer for The Walking Dead: World Beyond over here.

The Walking Dead: World Beyond crossovers are an exciting prospect for fans that like when the zombie shows share some narrative tissue. Since Fear the Walking Dead is currently years behind The Walking Dead, that leaves World Beyond as their best hope for seeing characters popping up in different shows in the “current” timeline. Gimple discussed with Entertainment Weekly how World Beyond will tie-in to The Walking Dead‘s primary series:

“We’re going to be discovering this very big aspect to the world that we haven’t yet seen. We’ve seen glimpses of it on the shows with the helicopters and with the soldier that we saw, Isabelle on Fear. The movie does obviously touch upon some of that mythology, as well as Rick being in one of those helicopters. In some ways, World Beyond, it’s a big story and yet it’s sort of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern to Rick’s Hamlet, meaning the show and the movie touch upon some of the same things, but they’re not really that deeply related.”

World Beyond takes place in Nebraska, much further away from the action we’ve seen in Georgia and West Virginia on the other shows. That will help keep the shows easily separated, though there will still be connections that longtime fans will pick up on. Gimple explained:

“They do share a universe, so where there are opportunities, we want to take them. Even with that album cover [with Ryan Hurst’s Beta appearing on Fear the Walking Dead], it was so funny. I mean, just by virtue of the fact that there was a scene with all these records in it, and we knew this shared aspect, we didn’t even want to make that big a deal of it. We just wanted it to exist in there so that people might, deep cut-wise, we were hoping one or two people might notice into the future. We didn’t want to make as big a deal about it. It’s just nice, even unto ourselves, between the shows to feel that it’s one world.”

So the kind of connective tissue we’re looking at will probably mostly be Easter eggs when it comes to referencing The Walking Dead and Fear the Walking Dead. Gimple essentially confirmed as much, saying:

“I will say that though this mythology appeared on The Walking Dead and on Fear the Walking Dead, those two shows aren’t going to be as involved with this. We don’t want to change all of The Walking Dead to having to do with this. It’ll wax and wane, it’ll occasionally touch upon it, but really there’s going to be brand new mythologies on each of these shows and even outside of these shows. This is not the new mythology for The Walking Dead. This is a new mythology for The Walking Dead universe. The new show is tied into it quite a bit, the movie is as well, but it isn’t going to be a driving force throughout all the shows on the universe.”

That’s probably the best direction for The Walking Dead to take. As it stands, the timeline of the shows is already rather confusing, so it would be much better if they kept to themselves rather than trying to force any connections. But since they all exists in the same universe, the presence of more subtle connective tissue is something that will keep longtime fans entertained.

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