Walking Dead writer and producer Scott M. Gimple — who served as showrunner for AMC’s long-running post-apocalyptic series from Season 4 through Season 8 and now serves as chief content officer for the Walking Dead television universe — has revealed that the show once planned to kill off the character of Carol Peletier, played by Melissa McBride. However, Gimple lobbied against the idea.

During a recent interview with Looper, Gimple — who first boarded The Walking Dead during its second season — was asked about the show’s remaining survivors, and if there were ever plans to kill any of them off. “The most potent one for me was early on, like… jeez, Season 3,” he replied. “There was some investigation going on about killing Carol. It got pretty far down the line and I was pretty hardcore against that. Because I saw her journey of going from somebody under her ex-husband’s thumb to being a warrior. It just looked like the most amazing journey for our character to have and having worked with Melissa McBride up to that point, it was like, ‘Oh, well, she could do that. She can do anything.’

“Man, I would love to look up some of the old emails or something like that because it was like, what if people thought she was dead, but she lived?” he continued. “At that point, that was a surprise as well, people were dying and dying. It was what the show was getting a lot of noise for at that point. And it seemed even early on switching that up, but really it was more about seeing that character go through that journey because she had started out as so passive and a victim. And to see her become one of the strongest people in the story seemed exciting to me as a writer.”

Of course, unlike her comic book counterpart — who perished within the pages of Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard’s The Walking Dead #42 in 2007 — McBride’s Carol is still around as AMC’s series heads into its 11th and final season. She is also slated to star in an upcoming spinoff series alongside Norman Reedus’ Daryl Dixon.

The Walking Dead stars Norman Reedus, Melissa McBride, Josh McDermitt, Christian Serratos, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Seth Gilliam, Ross Marquand, Khary Payton and Cooper Andrews.