On Sunday's episode, during a brawl with Maggie, Leah gets shot in the back of the head by Daryl, her former lover, and is killed instantly.
If Leah's death felt a bit anticlimactic, showrunner Angela Kang said they considered an alternative iteration of the scene.
"With Leah, we went through many, many iterations of the story and I think we even had an iteration where Daryl and Leah had more of a conversation," Kang told Insider.
What changed? A suggestion from the show's star, Norman Reedus, who has played Daryl since season one.
"This is one of the cases where in collaboration with our actors, Norman really was feeling like, 'You know, I don't even think I'd have anything left to say to her. If I came in and just saw Maggie in danger, I would take her out at that point.'"
"In this case, we wanted to also respect the actor's feelings about where he felt his character was at that point in the story," Kang added.
To his credit, Daryl said that if he saw Leah again that he was going to kill her. He's a man of his word.
It seems like Reedus has a lot of creative control on the series because this isn't the first time Reedus has weighed in on a big death scene.
In 2020, Ryan Hurst told Insider he was "a little sad" to not get a big fight scene with his real-life pals Reedus and Jeffrey Dean Morgan for his death.
At the time, Kang told Insider it felt like they already had done a similar "dragged out fight" between Daryl and Beta earlier and they didn't want a repeat. But on the October 4, 2020, episode of "Talking Dead," Hurst said he pitched a big fight scene and said it was Reedus who suggested Beta's quick, swift death.
"I was big on like, 'Yo, me and Daryl should have a big fight," Hurst said of pushing for it. "There should be a knife fight. They were like, 'Nah, we're just gonna stab you in the head.'"
He added: "Norm was like, 'Nah, I think I should just stab him in the face.' So, I lost that one."