Walking Dead will return Sunday with its midseason premiere, picking up with Rick (Andrew Lincoln) and the rest coping with losing Beth (Emily Kinney) and in search of a new place to call home.

Walking Dead Spoilers

Showrunner Scott M. Gimple offered a number of Walking Dead spoilers for when the show returns over the weekend. As Gimple points out, the main focus for the group is getting somewhere they can regroup. They can’t go back to the church. They can’t go back to the jail. With no new destination in mind, the group will likely end up divided on whether they should pursue a nomadic existence or seriously consider setting up camp somewhere and fast.

“They absolutely have to find some place safe. Where we’re leaving them off, they’re not in a great situation. We have this group of people and they have nowhere to go. They have to find somewhere to go — and for what’s been going on with them, someplace that they can stay,” Gimple told The Hollywood Reporter. “Carl [Chandler Riggs] was intimating in the first half that we just keep moving along, but Michonne [Danai Gurira] wasn’t terribly down with that idea.”

At some point in season 5, it’s more than likely that the group will end up in Alexandria, per the comic books from which the hit AMC zombie show is adapted.

“There’s a whole bunch of story that I want to hit in a lot of different directions and getting to [Alexandria], there’s a ton of stuff that I’m eager to get to,” Gimple says. “Stuff that is well beyond Alexandria. Then there’s some other things we want to do to provide some underpinnings to those stories — to be able to play them even harder than we saw them originally.”

“Whenever we get to Alexandria, it will probably have stuff that’s right out of the comic book and stuff that’s different,” he noted.

In the comic books, Rick’s group bumps into a man named Aaron on the way to Washington. Aaron, his boyfriend Eric and another guy named Douglas Monroe are all a part of the Safe-Zone in Alexandria. Aaron and Eric are recruiters, while Douglas is the leader. It’s rumored that Ross Marquand, whose casting was announced last month, will play Aaron.

Another new character that might be introduced this season is villain Negan – whose ruthless acts make The Governor’s villainy look like child’s play.

“Negan in general is going to be challenging. It’s such a story turn in the comic,” Gimple admitted. “There’s a particular story in that arc that I’m very excited for. But because we know where we’re going, we have some opportunities to play around with it and put some things in that will lead up to [Negan and Alexandria] in different ways yet fulfill the story Robert told to the nth degree by utilizing some slightly different approaches. Lineups and timelines and the whole nine yards.”

The Walking Dead returns Sunday, Feb. 8 with “What’s Happened and What’s Going On” on AMC at 9/8c.