Walking Dead’s Producer Reveals Why Negan’s Saviors Plot Evil So Well

The closing moments of the season six finale of The Walking Dead saw Rick Grimes and company awaiting their fate at the hands of Negan and his barbed wire-covered baseball bat Lucille — a trap they had been lured into by the infamous Saviors earlier in the episode.

This sequence came as a shock to many viewers, with some in disbelief that the Alexandrian residents had been so easily tricked by Negan’s henchman. However, in a recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, executive producer Greg Nicotero explained that the villainous group is one of the most seasoned out there.

“The Saviors, as sadistic as they may appear, they have a system that works for them,” he told EW. “Yeah, they’re f—ed up and they’re a little weird, but they’ve been doing this for a long time and they have a very large group. It’s not like it’s a pocket of 10 or 12 people. They have a good thing going and the most interesting thing about them for me is there’s mythos involved with them. It’s like, you hear about this guy Negan, just like you hear about this guy Rick, and you hear about these people. There’s a lot of that involved in season seven.”

Nicotero went on to say that fans can expect to find out more about the Saviors in season seven. “The nice thing about this season is you will get a chance to see some of these inner workings of these different worlds and these communities and really get a chance to see how much they know about the rest of the world,” he said. “I think that’s a really good theme for season seven which is, nobody really knows what the world has in store for them out there. So, the audience, just like these people, goes through these journeys.”

The premiere of the seventh season of The Walking Dead will air on AMC on Oct. 9.

Read more at EW.com.