This post contains spoilers for The Walking Dead Season 8 midseason finale.

So. Carl Grimes is a goner. What comes next? According to Andrew Lincoln, who plays the Grimes patriarch, Rick, on The Walking Dead, “from this episode onwards, that shit got real.”

The actor told Entertainment Weekly that the decision to kill off Carl shocked him; as he recalled, when Scott Gimple broke the news to him over the phone, Lincoln went so silent that the show-runner “said three times, ‘Are you there? Are you there? Are you there?’ I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what to say.”

“I never saw it coming because I always thought that the kid would be the future, and that was the whole point of this—that I was going to hand over the revolver and let him walk off into the distance, you know?” Lincoln continued. “So it was incredibly shocking. Everybody was reeling from it and continue to reel from it. I mean, you can’t write a character like Rick Grimes—whose engines are his wife and his son—and you take away the wife and you’re left with the son. And then, of course, there’s Judith, but then you take away the other engine that fuels him, that got him off his deathbed in the first-ever episode, and you take that away.”

As horrific as the news was, it’s hard to imagine that it came as a shock for many fans. Carl might be one of only five original characters left in The Walking Dead, but deaths like this have become the show’s bread and butter—and they’re almost always tied to premieres and finales. What’s more, the nature of his death has become painfully commonplace. Like Glenn, who often came close to death countless times before his actual death, Carl has seen his fair share of peril. And killing children has never been off limits; Sophia was revealed to be dead in Season 2 after a long search found her zombified in Hershel’s barn. Still, after so many seasons, Carl’s death will certainly come as a blow—and lest any fans be holding out hope for a miracle cure, Gimple said on Talking Dead that there’s really no hope for recovery.

“That is a bite on his side,” the show-runner said Sunday night. “The bite is going to play out as we’ve seen bites play out, and it’s very important to Carl’s story and the entire story what happens in the next episode. So I’m just focused on the fact that Carl right now is alive and he has some business to attend to.” Gimple later added that, indeed, the bite “is a one-way ticket. But I’d like to think that the things we see in the next episode are so important to his life and the other characters’ lives.”

Lincoln also confirmed to E.W. that the death will have a profound effect on Rick. Carl’s coming of age during the zombie apocalypse has served as a central anchor for the comic series in a way that never quite translated on the TV series—and yes, in the comics, the character is still alive. During the latter half of the season, Lincoln said his character became “very challenging” to play: “He’s in the middle of a war and he’s lost the reason he went to war,” Lincoln told E.W. “It’s a big deal, so to try to thread that needle was very challenging and exciting. There were many days that the show felt very dangerous again, and that was an unexpected sort of offshoot from what was a very, very dark and shocking revelation.”