- Warning: There are major spoilers ahead for "The Walking Dead" season 10, episode eight, "The World Before."
- Dante was swiftly killed not long after getting captured on Sunday's episode by Father Gabriel.
- "He felt like he might have screwed up in hesitating to act about Negan," showrunner Angela Kang told Insider of why Gabriel brutally killed Dante.
- Juan Javier Cardenas, who plays Dante, told Insider he read the scene as a breaking apart of Gabriel.
- Visit Insider's homepage for more stories.
Dante didn't last around too long after killing Siddiq on last week's "The Walking Dead."
After sitting a lot of the season on the sidelines, Father Gabriel shockingly took matters into his own hands and brutally stabbed the Whisperer mole to death in his prison cell instead of letting the council or community at large decide his fate.
"I think in the way that we are playing Gabriel's story, he's feeling a lot of the weight of being one of the leaders of the community and being on the council and the head of the council," showrunner Angela Kang told Insider when asked why it was Gabriel who killed Dante instead of Rosita or anyone else.
A lot of it boils down to the last mistake that happened at Alexandria, which Gabriel feels responsible for.
"We think that he felt like he might have screwed up in hesitating to act about Negan," said Kang. "The night that he took to think about what should Negan's fate be, which is fair and right, that it led to an opening where Negan escaped. I think in the moment he's reacting to the fact that Dante has killed a beloved member of his community and his own family, and he kind of swings in the other direction."
Juan Javier Cardenas, who plays Dante, saw his death scene as being revealing of something else in Gabriel. After all, Father Gabriel doesn't simply stab Dante dead. He stabs him 10 times over and multiple times in the chest.
"That last scene, what I take from it is really seeing a bit of a breaking apart of the Gabriel character," Cardenas told Insider of what he took from his death scene. "My experience working with Seth [Gilliam] and seeing him interpret Gabriel on set, I think he's a fascinating character of this cool, studied collected individual who's trying desperately as a faith leader in this community, and one of the older members of the community, to kind of maintain a sense of civility and control and rising above the kind of barbarity that's outside of the walls of Alexandria."
"So to see someone like Gabriel, in that moment, make that decision to unleash that kind of ferocity and that kind of animalistic rage is something so fascinating to see a character go from one extreme to the other," he added of Gabriel's very sudden and violent turn. "These people are put under intense amounts of pressure, and it's interesting to see what it takes to see them crack. And in that moment, I think the Dante character, that kind of betrayal, that level of coldness and deception and that corrosion of everybody... was that last straw that was kind of breaking that level of civility and Gabriel or that kind of control.... I think it's a very sad, but it's a very revealing moment about the character."
Negan's escape is definitely something that has been weighing on Gabriel this half season. As his girlfriend Rosita said, he has spent a lot of time out of the gates of the community looking for any sign of Negan. There's most likely a pent up frustration in Gabriel from not being able to find him. Added to that was the fact that Gabriel wasn't able to notice that something may have been off with Dante.
Kang says that darkness that we see in Gabriel originates from the first time when we met him on season five.
"Father Gabriel has spent so much of the series trying to redeem himself for what he considers his original sin of locking out his congregation to save himself," said Kang of Father Gabriel's arc on the show. "As storytellers, what I see in that story is, there is a darkness within Gabriel, too, and that's something that he's struggling with a bit. And so it's just in the passion of that moment, he engages in the vigilante justice that he did not want to see happen with Negan."
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