Late in the sixth season of AMC's The Walking Dead, the characters of Tara (Alanna Masterson) and Heath (Corey Hawkins) got into an RV and headed out into the countryside on a two-week supply run. On an episode titled Swear, the sixth episode of the show's seventh season, we saw that the supply run didn't go very well for them. The pair got separated, and Heath vanished.
Two years later, the show finally gave us the answer of what happened to Heath, although the character wasn't directly referenced when we were given the answer. Sometime between Swear and season 9, episode 5, Heath's RV was featured as a hidden Easter egg in the junkyard inhabited by Anne (a.k.a. Jadis, played by Pollyanna McIntosh) and her community of Scavengers. On season 9, episode 5, an episode called What Comes After, Anne was seen driving the RV, not long before she radioed for a helicopter that flew her and Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) out of the series.
If you recognized the vehicle Anne was driving, you probably jumped to the conclusion that Heath must have been one of the people she and her people sent off with the mysterious helicopter folks. After the episode aired, showrunner Angela Kang confirmed that Heath is no longer on the show because he was flown off to who-knows-where.
That was kind of the intention that we had in the back of our heads this whole time. Even back in that season where you know we had to write the wonderful Corey Hawkins out because he had huge opportunities in the feature film world… those seeds were already set there."
Kang and The Walking Dead universe's chief content officer Scott M. Gimple have both said that they hope to bring Heath back into the world of the show at some point. Robert Kirkman, creator of the comic book source material, was quoted as saying,
We are hoping to get him back and tell his story. There are definitely plans in place there. It's just a matter of making sure that everything can line up because it is somewhat complicated."
Since Heath was presumably taken off to same location Rick and Anne were, maybe we'll see Hawkins reprise the role in the three TV movies that will be showing us what happened to Rick and why he has now been missing, believed to be dead, for six years in the show's timeline.
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