The Walking Dead season 8 will not air on 17 December: Find out show's return date and Rick's fate

The Walking Dead season 8 will not return this week as the show is on a hiatus after its shocking mid-season finale. The show will make a comeback on AMC with episode 9 in February next year. Till then fans need to wait to see how Rick Grimes handles Carl's death and whether he will survive or not.

In the previous episode, Carl gets bitten by a zombie but he was neither shown dead nor turned into a walker himself. Many believe he may survive and that his bite was caused by a Whisperer member and not a walker.

It will be interesting to see how Rick reacts to the major blow. Will he kill Negan and avenge the death of his family members or will he again take a foolish and immature decision (he trusted the vile scavengers twice) and might get killed by the Savior leader instead.

A TV Guide report claims that Andrew Lincoln's contract with AMC is going to expire with season 8. And with the death of the original casts, it may not be a surprise if the lead protagonists may die. Many of the show fans think, Carl's death was uncalled for and the producers could have found a better alternative to entice the audience in order to retain the losing fan base.

The show creators are definitely under huge pressure to brainstorm a better screenplay to keep the show interesting as its viewership rating continues to drop rapidly with each episode. Compared to its previous mid-season breaks, the fall finale was the lowest-rated ever for the AMC series as it managed to grab only 7.9 million viewers.

Many ardent fans are not happy with the show as there seems to be no goal for the characters despite the fight between different groups and their common struggle with the walkers.

But no one knows how the story of the survivors in the post-apocalyptic world will proceed and probably end. With Carl's death, the show took a major deviation from Robert Kirkman's novel and there is still no sign of cure to the zombie outbreak yet. This has resulted in redundancy where the plot moves nowhere.

In one of his personal message to the Spoiling Dead Fan, a popular TWD fan page on Facebook, Chandler Riggs (Carl) revealed that the series has only "few seasons left." "I get that you guys have been doing this since we started, but I have a request. Out of respect for me, for Carl, and for one of the last few seasons of the show, I'm using you to not spoil the ending of 808 once your sources inform you of what happens," he said.

Lincoln, meanwhile, teased ComicBook that the show will change drastically after Carl's death. "This is bigger than any other death that we've ever had and we realize that as it plays out in the back eight. The back eight is completely different from the front eight. This episode happens and everything changes. We spin off into a completely different new world," he told the website.