‘WALKING DEAD’ HOW THE SHOW WROTE OUT RICK GRIMES

WARNING: Spoilers galore. So Rick didn’t die after all. AMC is just writing him off the original “The Walking Dead” and placing him in AMC original films. Production begins next year.

Yes, it’s a feint. AMC promoted the heck out of him leaving the show, with the implication that Rick Grimes was a goner.

So while AMC wasn’t able to keep Andrew Lincoln’s departure a secret, they did keep the plot twist of Rick being ferried off in a helicopter under wraps.

“I feel a great sense of relief and accomplishment and satisfaction,” Lincoln told Yvette Nicole Brown on “Talking Dead.”

Lincoln said he tried to leave the show last season but he decided not to go away just yet. “I wasn’t ready,” he said. So they planned his rather heroic “death” with Michonne, Daryl and Carol there to see him go as he blew up the bridge that was a metaphor for his efforts to keep everyone (even those at the Sanctuary as well as Negan ) alive.

No doubt this feint will cause a lot of “Walking Dead” fans to roll their eyes. There they go again, going back to Glenn surviving the dumpster walkers.

But as Lincoln said, it does give the original franchise a chance to breathe and move forward without the sometimes limiting presence of Rick Grimes. And Scott Gimple and “The Walking Dead” executives have big plans to expand the show’s universe in a “Star Trek” sort of way so it’s around in some form for decades. Doing films is one way to go about it.

“It’s not the beginning of the end, it’s the end of the beginning,” Lincoln said in a supplemental press release. “And I like the idea that we get to tell a bigger story, maybe with a sort of wider vista. And I’ve always been interested in what’s going on out there, you know, whether or not there is contact with the wider world. I want to know the meta of it all. And I suppose to be able to kind of touch upon that in a contained story for me is a very exciting proposition … Maybe it’s the start of a bigger story.”