‘The Walking Dead’ Season 9 Premiere: Here’s How Big The Time Jump Will Be

Fans have been wondering just how long the time jump between the Season 8 finale of AMC’s The Walking Dead and the Season 9 premiere will be. Now, it seems that one of the actors involved in the show has clarified this detail ahead of the Season 9 premiere in October.

As previously reported by the Inquisitr, the Season 9 premiere of The Walking Dead will involve a time jump. However, it has been unclear just how big a jump this will be. Now, Tom Payne, who plays Paul “Jesus” Rovia in The Walking Dead, has confirmed via an early screening of the Season 9 premiere that the time jump will be approximately one and a half years from when Season 8 ended, according to Bloody Disgusting.

And, as many fans of The Walking Dead comics the TV series is based on already suspected, Season 9 will likely see a return to a simpler lifestyle. This is also something else Payne confirmed.

“Everyone has to go back to basics,” Payne said.

“Farmers are really useful, and Hilltop, that was their whole deal. They were growing stuff and tending the farm animals, and so that community is maybe doing better than other communities.”

Season 9 appears to take a decided turn from the war-heavy previous seasons of The Walking Dead as the group settles down into a simpler lifestyle now that Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) has been captured and detained.

While this time jump was mostly expected by fans of the comics, it is unclear how AMC will tie in this time jump with the newly revealed decision by Morgan Jones (Lennie James) to return home. This revelation was made in a new trailer for the Season 4 return of The Walking Dead‘s companion series, Fear the Walking Dead, according to a previous Inquisitr article.

Fear the Walking Dead aired well after The Walking Dead did. However, it was set prior to Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) waking up from his coma in the pilot episode of The Walking Dead. Since Season 1 of Fear aired, it has been on a slant to join up to the current timeline in The Walking Dead, something it did at the beginning of Season 4 when Morgan left Alexandria and made the long walk across to Texas.

Now that the two shows had officially caught up, time-wise, it seems The Walking Dead has jumped forward once more. Which means that if Morgan really does return to Alexandria, AMC will have to account for the time jump once more. Although, with a hurricane threatening in the Season 4 return of Fear, it is possible Morgan’s plans will be delayed until this weather event passes.

However, viewers will just have to tune into Fear the Walking Dead when it returns on August 12 and The Walking Dead in October to find out if everything lines up once more.

Season 9 of The Walking Dead will premiere on AMC on Sunday, October 7, at 9/8c.