How long was Rick Grimes in a coma on The Walking Dead?

In the golden age of television that began in the 2000s, few shows found the level of success that The Walking Dead did. Based on the Image Comics series by writer Robert Kirkman and artist Tony Moore of the same name, the series has been adapted for the small screen by AMC with exciting results (At least in the early seasons, anyway). Not only did the series last 11 seasons, with over 170 episodes aired, but it spawned an entire universe of shows that continue to this day.

It all started with that amazing pilot episode titled “Days Gone Bye” remains one of the best films in the history of “The Walking Dead.” Which sees Andrew Lincoln’s Rick Grimes wake up from a coma to discover that the world has been overrun by zombies. As society collapsed, Rick sat there in his hospital bed. But how did Rick survive without medical support? More importantly, how long was Rick in that coma? There are a lot of them actually, even if the answer to the question itself is fairly obvious.

Rick wakes up from his coma and identifies events “The Walking Dead” is the first season, which is still seen as the climax of the series. It’s a really great way to start things off, not unlike the way director Danny Boyle starts off 28 Days Later. But how long did Rick have to languish in a hospital bed while the world crumbled around him? In a 2015 interview with Business insider“Fear the Walking Dead” director Dave Erickson explained, with relative precision, how long Rick was in his coma.

“In the coma, Rick was probably out for four to five weeks. If you count the days of the first season of our show, we’ll probably be in about week three (by the end of ‘Fear the Walking Dead’ season 1),” Robert said of him.

So here we go. But there is still another pressing question that needs to be answered. It’s not just the length of time, but also how Rick survived without fluids or support from the hospital. AMC actually answered that in a roundabout way, with a webisode titled “Section”. This webisode shows us a character named Gil Marcones, a doctor who stayed at the hospital Rick was in even as the outbreak began.

In short, this dedicated doctor is the main reason Rick was able to survive his coma. So, even in the world of something as unrealistic as a zombie apocalypse, AMC and the creative team behind the show thought about how Rick could survive, even if there wasn’t room to show that in the show itself.

As mentioned earlier, the world of “The Walking Dead” is now somewhat expanded. It includes many shows, some of which lasted only a short time Like the 2022 anthology show “Tales of the Walking Dead,” Which only had one season. Then there’s “Fear the Walking Dead,” a show that has been a notable success. It was the first spin-off of the main series and, to date, the most profitable for AMC.

Fear the Walking Dead ran for eight seasons, with the final episode scheduled to air in late 2023. The show centered on a new group of characters in a new setting. While the main series is largely set in and around Atlanta, Georgia, the spin-off takes place in Los Angeles, California, and shows us what happened at the beginning of the outbreak in one of the world’s most populous cities. It doesn’t really have anything to do with Rick Grimes but there is a question as to when Rick wakes up from his coma during the events of the show.

People at almost He broke down the franchise’s timeline in 2019 to help clarify a few things for viewers. Day 0 is basically the beginning of Fear the Walking Dead when zombies first start appearing. The port then pegs Rick’s wake-up date as Day 59. This lines up with Kirkman’s timeline, as Rick ended up in the hospital after the zombies started showing up but before the problem got really huge. The outlet then explains that the Season 3 finale of “Fear the Walking Dead” will take place on Day 64.

Using this timeline, we can estimate within a day or two that Rick woke up from his coma in Fear the Walking Dead Season 3, Episode 10, which was titled “The Diviner.” In short, Rick’s journey began halfway across the country during this show’s run.

“The Walking Dead” began as a comic book published by Image starting with the first issue in October 2003. Robert Kirkman was the book’s sole writer all the way through, with Tony Moore handling the artwork for the first six issues. After that, a group of artists lent their talents to the book until its conclusion.

This end came somewhat suddenly in 2019 when Kirkman suddenly revealed that “The Walking Dead” will conclude with issue #193. 16 years later, that was the case. Meanwhile, the show debuted in 2010 after a fairly long development process. At one point, NBC was going to make the show, albeit a radically different version than the one we got.

while The series finale of “The Walking Dead” was different from the ending of the comicsthere were a lot of moments ripped straight from the pages of the book, especially in the earlier seasons. Rick’s coma was, in fact, something pulled straight from the source material. This was not a plot device cooked up by AMC or showrunner Frank Darabont for television. It was rather an attempt to make a faithful adaptation of the book.

Just for fun, it might be worth talking about a theory that’s been around for some time regarding Rick’s coma. For a time, many fans were convinced that the entirety of “The Walking Dead” was only happening in Rick’s mind. The idea is that he was still in the hospital in a coma. Kirkman didn’t let this theory stand for long, and eventually debunked it personally.

“We’re on the record to answer this: Rick is still in a coma. The events of TWD are definitely happening,” Kirkman said. x/twitter In 2014, he debunked a then-popular fan theory. So Rick’s zombie was real, and central to the vast, sprawling universe that the zombie comic inspired.

“The Walking Dead” is now streaming on AMC+. Or you can get the entire series on Blu-ray via Amazon.