The Walking Dead showrunner confirms Hornsby thinks the Hilltop is 'full of s---'

Warning: This article contains spoilers about Sunday's episode of The Walking Dead, "Trust."

Oh, what is that sneaky Lance Hornsby up to now? The Commonwealth bigwig began Sunday's episode of The Walking Dead determined to get to the bottom of who slaughtered both his soldiers and his super-creepy post-apocalyptic BFF Toby Carlson.

Aaron and Gabriel told a tall tale, but Lance (Josh Hamilton) didn't seem to believe them, so he marched his troops to the Hilltop to investigate. But when Maggie's truck wouldn't start and Hershel wouldn't crack, Hornsby was left without proof that the community had taken out his troops — even as Maggie, Daryl, and Elijah had their weapons trained on him for cornering Maggie's son. (Sucks for him.)

But has Hornsby courted an unlikely ally in an attempt to take out the Hilltop? The episode ended with him offering a job to the person who actually began the whole mess by killing soldiers and taking weapons: Daryl's old flame Leah.

What does a potential alliance between Lance and Leah mean? Is Hornsby still convinced Hilltop was involved in the kerfuffle? And what exactly is going on with all the sudden rule-breaking back at the Commonwealth? We went to Walking Dead showrunner Angela Kang for answers.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: We see Lance Hornsby offer Leah a job at the end there. What is that job? Is it replacing the dearly departed maniac Toby Carlson?

ANGELA KANG: I will have to say to watch the next episode and find out. But you've got a couple people who are out there making trouble, and so more trouble's going to happen as a result of this pairing.

Let's talk a little bit more about that trouble and Hornsby, because Hilltop refused his offer when he tried to do it the nice way, now he clearly suspects that they're involved in killing these soldiers, and Maggie and Daryl both had guns on him. So what's his plan when he walks out those Hilltop doors?

What I'll say about Hornsby is he's the fixer of the Commonwealth. He works on big problems and makes them go away. So with this guy, there are 1,000 different moves that he's like, "Click, click, click, click, click." Running through the gears of his head. Anything beyond that is a spoiler.

Well, the Hilltop puts on this show that they had nothing to do with killing the Commonwealth soldiers, so when Hornsby leaves there, does he believe them or does he still think they're involved somehow and he just hasn't been able to prove it yet?

He thinks they're full of s---. Yeah, 100 percent. He thinks they're full of s---

So does his plan for Hilltop involve Leah then perhaps?

You'll just have to watch and see.

Let's get to more of a big-picture question. In this episode, we see Max and Mercer and Tomi all either breaking the rules or talking about having broken the rules or talking about breaking the rules in the future. How much is the foundation of the community starting to shake a bit here, and how responsible are the folks from Alexandria in terms of setting that in motion?

I think that there are some things starting to crack, and the way that we looked at the story is that whenever we bring the heroes that we've been following for a long time into a new community, we ask ourselves, "What changes as a result of them coming?" Because by bringing a new element into an ecosystem, the ecosystem is going to change as a result.

So what they come into is a system where there is a lot of unhappiness. Just the fact that Max was calling people on the radio trying to connect and was willing to run away at first, that tells you something about her state of mind. The fact that you never quite know where Mercer stands a lot of the time, that tells you something. The fact that there was a soldier who came and said, "There's thousands like me that are unhappy with this system" — that tells you something.

But a lot of times it takes something to push people into further action, beyond just the feeling of like, "I am discontented." So our heroes coming into the situation, suddenly a bunch of dynamics have shifted, and you're also seeing people who are used to living more free and have survived all these years, just like everybody in the Commonwealth. And the Commonwealth's sell to everybody has been, "Well, certain things work a certain way, but look, you all get to live and this is the only way that people survive."

So when you don't have any other perspective beyond that, it's really easy to go, "Well, if we change anything, then maybe it does all fall apart." So when people come in and say, "Actually, we've made it this long and we didn't live like this," then that does start to change perspectives. That's not to say that the people of the Commonwealth don't have their own agency, but they are being affected by our heroes, and our heroes are being affected by them.

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