The Real Reason Sonequa Martin-Green's Sasha Died In The Walking Dead Season 7
This post contains spoilers for "The Walking Dead" seasons 7 and 8.
Introduced in season 3 as Tyreese's (Chad Coleman) cool, tough sister, Sasha (Sonequa Martin-Green) quickly gets thrown through the ringer: She nearly dies from the flu, gets captured by cannibals, her boyfriend gets eaten by said cannibals, her brother Tyreese gets bitten by a walker, and then she has to watch as her new boyfriend is beaten to death with a bat.
While poor Sasha never caught a break, season 7's big villain Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) was able to catch her. By the end of the seventh season, Sasha is taken prisoner in Negan's camp, and she realizes that Negan will use her as a hostage to further control Rick's (Andrew Lincoln) group. Sasha thusly asks the cowardly double-agent Eugene (Josh McDermitt) to sneak her a weapon to use against Negan, but Eugene only offers her a suicide pill.
When Negan decides to put Sasha into a coffin as part of a theatrical demonstration to Rick's crew, Sasha goes in willingly and discreetly swallows the pill once she's in there. By the time Negan opens the casket again, Sasha has already turned into a walker. She doesn't manage to bite Negan as planned, but she does at least get to kill his henchman Roy (C. Thomas Howell). She also creates a convenient distraction for Rick's group to take advantage of, allowing them to fight back against Negan with the element of surprise.
Do Sasha's actions end the war? Sadly no, but they do help turn the tide a little. It takes another 16 episodes for Negan to be properly defeated, but at least Sasha gives Rick's crew a win after a long season full of Ls. But why did the character meet her maker in season 7 to begin with?
It was rumored that Sasha was killed off because Sonequa Martin-Green found a new gig
One complication to Sasha's death, at least in terms of how "Walking Dead" fans received it, was that it felt like something the show had been forced to include due to outside circumstances. In December 2016, eight episodes before her "Walking Dead" counterpart kicked the bucket, the news broke that Martin-Green would be playing the lead in the CBS All Access series "Star Trek: Discovery." From the moment that information got out, most fans figured that Sasha's days were numbered.
But although the news of Martin-Green's "Star Trek" gig was correctly interpreted as a bad omen for her "Walking Dead" character, those same fans had gotten the order of events backwards. Sasha wasn't killed off because Martin-Green had accepted another job; Martin-Green had accepted another job because Sasha had been killed off. As the actor explained in an Entertainment Weekly interview shortly after the "Walking Dead" season 7 finale aired:
"It couldn't have worked out more perfectly, because what was happening on 'Walking Dead' was already underway. It was the path. It was definitely in place. And then as we were going into the very end of the season, the very end of our shoot for the season — that's when the opportunity for 'Star Trek' came. And so I know some people might think that I left 'Walking Dead' to do 'Star Trek,' but it did not happen that way. It was after 'Walking Dead' was already ending that the opportunity for 'Star Trek' came."
Of course, even if she had left "The Walking Dead" to headline a "Star Trek" series, it would've been hard to blame her. Few actors would pass up the chance to move on from being an ensemble player to a lead, especially when it means joining a franchise as big as "Star Trek." As Martin-Green put it in the same interview, "'Star Trek' has definitely been printed in the hearts of so many people and has been since the '60s, obviously. To go from such a favorite show, to arguably the most favorite show of all time, is [laughs] I still think I'm catching my breath."
As far as Walking Dead deaths go, Sasha had it good
Sasha is a unique character in that, much like Daryl (Norman Reedus) or Tara (Alanna Masterson), she has no comic book counterpart for fans to compare her to. However, her character arc does somewhat echo what happens in the comics to Tyreese's daughter, who dies as part of a suicide pact with her bad-influence boyfriend. The circumstances are different, of course, but it's easy to wonder if comic Tyreese's daughter (who doesn't exist in the "Walking Dead" show) served as inspiration for the fate of TV Tyreese's sister.
The other inspiration for Sasha's season 7 storyline seems to be Holly, a comic character who is also imprisoned by Negan and dies at a similar point in the story. The difference is that comic Holly dies with little agency; she's killed off-screen, and the surprise reveal of her being a walker comes at the expense of Rick's crew, not Negan's.
The fact that Sasha gets a death that's mostly on her own terms is fairly wholesome by this show's standards. Sasha may not have gotten to see the results of her fateful decision, but at least she died with a level of dignity that few other "Walking Dead" characters have enjoyed. As showrunner Scott Gimple put it in an EW interview on the heels of the season 7 finale, "The story was about Sasha getting the final word." When asked about how long he'd been planning Sasha's death, Gimple explained:
"You regret deeply that this is going to be a big part of Sasha's story, the loss of Abraham and the thirst of revenge and making the world right, her journey throughout that whole thing, who that made her, and also her being there for Maggie, and yet having this other agenda. At the very least, we knew what her story was going to be. We had somewhat of an idea where it was going to end. Sonequa [Martin-Green] and I were talking about that from the beginning of the year that it was definitely a possibility."