Did Rick Grimes survive his final ‘Walking Dead’ episode?

Sunday night marked Andrew Lincoln’s final episode of AMC juggernaut “The Walking Dead.”

Lincoln, 45, was the center of the hit series since its inception in 2010, starring as the sheriff-turned-survivor Rick Grimes — and his time is finally up.

The penultimate episode left Rick impaled on on steel rod with a horde of staggering zombies bearing down on him. He cheated death once again, only to spend his final hour “finding his family” in a surreal fever dream of visits with long-lost cast members Shane Walsh (Jon Bernthal), Hershel Greene (the late Scott Wilson) and Sasha Williams (Sonequa Martin-Green)

One by one, they urge him to “wake up.”

In the end, he’s not reunited with his lost wife Lori or son Carl. It’s his chosen family members—Daryl, Maggie, and his love, Michonne—who attempt to come to his rescue. “I found them,” Rick says, as he fires a bullet into dynamite on the bridge, blowing the zombie herd to smithereens—and presumably sacrificing himself.

The big reveal: Rick isn’t dead.

He’s last seen being airlifted in a mysterious helicopter. And in another shocker—the episode ends with a time jump featuring a grownup version of Rick’s daughter, Judith Grimes.

Former showrunner (and current Chief Content Officer of “The Walking Dead” universe) Scott M. Gimple revealed in the post-mort on “Talking Dead” that Rick’s universe will be expanded in a series of original films to air on AMC.

“There’s something beautiful in the original DNA of the show in that it is all about change,” Lincoln told Entertainment Weekly of his exit. “The show will live on and it will continue to be great … It’s exciting because there is a sense that there is a new vision for the show.”

He added, “It’s a really exciting landscape that all of the characters are inhabiting. It’s the show I always thought we’d get to when I did the pilot — a pared down, much more dangerous and compromising and spare landscape … What I don’t want to do is stay too long when I think the show will actually benefit from other people taking the reins and forging a new path, and that’s what I think is happening now.”

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via USAHint.com