Warning! This article contains spoilers for The Walking Dead season 11, episode 24. If you've not yet caught up with the show, turn back now.
The Walking Dead series finale featured a whole bunch of cheer-worthy moments, from Rosita bursting free of a bunch of snarling zombies to Maggie and the gang blowing up the horde that had infiltrated the Commonwealth. One didn't revolve around action, however, it was merely a line delivered by Norman Reedus's Daryl Dixon – and it turns out, the actor had to be convinced to say it on set.
The line comes towards the end of the episode, as Daryl and the gang try to convince Commonwealth governor Pamela Milton to open up the barricaded neighborhood of the community's elite and let the trapped residents from the lower class areas seek shelter.
"Stop! What the hell are you doing?" Daryl shouts to a panicked Pamela. "We all deserve better than this. You built this place to be like the old world – that was the fuckin' problem...”
"If I open the gates, the dead will get in, not just the living," Pamela mumbles back, to which Daryl replies: "If you don't, you're going to lose anything anyway. We got one enemy. We ain't the walking dead."
"I didn't want to say it, I'll be honest with you. I didn't want to say it, and they kind of talked me into saying it," Reedus confessed in a new interview with Vanity Fair, before referencing the first time the show namechecked itself back in season 5.
"If you remember way back when [Andrew Lincoln's] Rick [Grimes] says it, he was like, 'We are not the walking dead,' and he made such a big thing of it that I was like, 'Well, I can't make a big thing of it now because that's what Andy did way back then.'
"So I kind of just incorporated it into the dialogue, and I didn't want to shout it from the rooftops, because that's what he did. So I had to figure out a way to just make it part of the sentence without making it a poster."
In actuality, Rick said "we are the walking dead" in his rousing speech to the group all those years ago, and Daryl audibly rejects the comparison. "We ain't them, we ain't them," he grunts as he stands up and walks away from Rick and the campfire – which makes his words to Pamela in the last-ever episode all the more fitting.
For more on the ever-expanding apocalypse-set franchise, check out our how to watch The Walking Dead guide if you're contemplating watching or rewatching the main series, Fear the Walking Dead, and more. Or, if you'd rather look forward, have a read up on all of the upcoming Walking Dead spin-offs announced so far.
