The Walking Dead: Dead City season 3 set pics tease heartbreaking cameo from one of the horror franchise's OG characters

Looks like The Walking Dead: Dead City season 3 is gearing up to break our hearts, with recently captured set pics revealing that Emily Kinney's Beth is going to have a cameo in the new batch of episodes.

In a bunch of snaps posted to X by @TWDUfilming, we can see Maggie actor Lauren Cohan and Kinney shooting a scene in Central Park. Judging by the regular clothes they're sporting, the takeaway coffee cups they're holding, and all the un-undead extras, it seems set to be a dream sequence. Makes sense, of course, given that Maggie's younger sister Beth died in The Walking Dead season 5 – or 18 years ago, if we're going by the horror franchise's timeline.

"I'm so emotional about this! Maggie deserved this, [to] see her little sister one more time, say their good byes. Maybe in her dream, [her] dad is alive too," one emotional viewer replied to the tweet.

"Oh I will be SICK, this is everything," said another, while a third wrote: "Nonono they sure do know how to make a b***h cry." Check out the pics below...

Back in the day, The Walking Dead was notorious for killing off its main characters. As the series was coming to an end, it was always shocking seeing old stills from the first couple of seasons and realizing how few of the survivors actually made it out alive. While Negan's vicious murder of Maggie's husband Glenn (Steven Yeun) stands out as one of the franchise's most brutal, and subsequently paved the narrative way for the Dead City spin-off, the one that always stuck with me was Beth's.

During a tense hostage exchange inside Grady Memorial Hospital in 'Coda', Beth stabbed corrupt cop leader Dawn in the shoulder with a pair of scissors, causing Dawn to accidentally shoot Beth in the head. The youngster died on the spot, leading to a tearful Daryl (Norman Reedus) immediately executing Dawn – one of the few times he actually killed a living character up until that point.

Whenever I rewatch the series, I always hate how sudden and unnecessary it feels, and it guts me every time when a sobbing Maggie falls to her knees, having spotted that Beth isn't alive in Daryl's arms as he carries her out of the hospital. In short, I'm going to stock up on tissues before their reunion in Dead City season 3...

Interestingly, this won't be the first time The Walking Dead Universe has seen a character wonder what their life would've been like had the world not succumbed to a devastating zombie apocalypse. In The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live, Rick (Andrew Lincoln) imagines meeting Michonne (Danai Gurira) in a pre-outbreak world.

In those moments, we see them strike up a conversation on a park bench, as a nervous Rick asks Michonne for directions to a nearby building ahead of his first day on a new job. "It was very cute. We talked very intensely about how you take something like The Walking Dead, which is not a love story genre, and really lean into making it a love story genre," Gurira previously told GamesRadar+. "When Scott [Gimple] came up with this aspect of it in the teleplay, I was like, 'Oh, that's good. That's good stuff.' Because it's like, 'Of course that's how he survives, he has to escape. He escapes and goes into a dream place that is wholly devoid of the issues and the horror and the apocalypse and the loss'. That's how he keeps himself alive. It encompasses that hope and joy of falling in love."

The Walking Dead: Dead City seasons 1 and 2 are streaming now on AMC+. For more, check out our our guide on how to watch The Walking Dead in order.