At this point in “The Walking Dead” timeline, longtime zombie hunter Carl Grimes (Chandler Riggs) could probably fire a weapon with his eyes closed, so the question is, uh, did he?
A certain optical mystery involving Carl has been plaguing fans since Season 7. It seems there was a pretty big mistake on the episode “Something They Need,” but we haven’t been able to confirm the truth.
Until now.
First, a quick recap: In the episode, the Alexandrian survivors (including Carl) head to the Oceanside community to retrieve some guns and end up staving off an incoming horde of walkers in the process.
After the intense scenes aired, the internet couldn’t get over one tiny detail.
It looked like Carl Grimes was aiming his weapon with the wrong eye.
Carl lost his right eye in Season 6 of the show, so when it appeared he was aiming with his patch, Twitter reacted accordingly.
And it didn’t stop with that scene.
From the still images, it seemed like an obvious gaffe. But when we asked “Walking Dead” executive producer David Alpert about the incident at New York Comic-Con last fall, he denied any mistake.
Alpert told us he didn’t believe Carl was aiming with the patch and dismissed the tweets as “pretty funny.”
We didn’t see Alpert’s response coming, so we couldn’t just leave the mystery there.
Since (spoiler alert) our favorite cowboy-hat-wearing, pudding-eating cast member is leaving for good this Sunday due to a fatal zombie bite, we took the opportunity to ask him in a conference call on Tuesday for his thoughts on eye-gate.
Ladies, gentlemen, zombies: Our dude finally confirmed that, yes, he was aiming with the patch.
“After I got my eye shot out, we ended up switching my holster to my left pant leg, and ... I had to retrain my left hand to shoot and aim down, and by the time I got to do it with machine guns and assault rifles and stuff I got lazy with it.”
“It felt way too awkward having to put [the guns] on my left shoulder and aim down with my left eye,” he added. “It was super weird, so I was just like, forget continuity. That’s just ridiculous.”
So there you have it. Case closed. He was using the wrong peeper.
Iris-pect his answer, though. Rather than deny the mistake even happened ― like some other people (we’re looking at you, Alpert) ― Riggs was pretty candid. And why shouldn’t he be? As we noted following the Season 7 episode, the actor even joked on Twitter about whether it was wise to trust a one-eyed kid with a machine gun.
Does it ruin the show that the guy is using his missing eye to aim? Nah, but isn’t it eye-ronic? Don’t ya think?