Is Carl still alive in The Walking Dead? Scott Gimple says 'he has some business to attend to'

The Walking Dead season 8 mid-season finale delivered a big shock to the audience as they came to know that Carl received a bite during his fight with the zombies in the woods. Carl's father Rick and adopted mother Michonne were also shocked by the development.

The twist was a contrast to the graphic novel written by Robert Kirkman. Fans took it to Twitter to slam the show's executive producer, Scott Gimple with many accusing him of deviating from the original novel and using cheap tactics to bring back the show (which is slowly losing its grip on the audiences) on track.

But during his interview with Vanity Fair, he surprisingly revealed that "Carl right now is alive," though a zombie bite is a "one-way ticket." "That is a bite on his side," Gimple told the website.

But since TWD did not show him dead literally, he insisted he still had some business to do.

"The bite is going to play out as we've seen bites play out, and it's very important to Carl's story and the entire story what happens in the next episode. So I'm just focused on the fact that Carl right now is alive and he has some business to attend to. The bite "is a one-way ticket. But I'd like to think that the things we see in the next episode are so important to his life and the other characters' lives," he added.

Reacting to Carl's death, Andrew Lincoln, who plays the on-screen dad to Chandler Riggs'character, said: "I never saw it coming because I always thought that the kid would be the future, and that was the whole point of this—that I was going to hand over the revolver and let him walk off into the distance, you know?"

Lincoln, who plays the show protagonist Rick, admits that the entire cast is shocked. "So it was incredibly shocking. Everybody was reeling from it and continue to reel from it. I mean, you can't write a character like Rick Grimes—whose engines are his wife and his son—and you take away the wife and you're left with the son. And then, of course, there's Judith, but then you take away the other engine that fuels him, that got him off his deathbed in the first-ever episode, and you take that away."