I’ve been watching “The Walking Dead” since the beginning, as well as defending it to its many haters, but even I’ll admit that the series has grown pretty stale in recent years. Last season, in particular, did little to make me feel the show has much wind left in its sails, so you could say I’m not all that excited about its return to AMC next month.

Then again, there’s a pretty big factor that makes Season 9 of the series a must watch, as it’s been promised to be the final season for Andrew Lincoln’s Rick Grimes. We don’t know if Grimes will be killed off or if the character will simply leave and never be seen again, but we can be 100% certain that at some point in Season 9, Grimes will be leaving us.

This latest trailer finally plays up the end of an era. It’s mostly the same trailer as the one that hit out of SDCC earlier this year, but it’s got some new footage and a new intro.

In Season 9…

“We meet up with our survivors a year and a half after the war with Negan, and the world they knew is rapidly changing.”

“We’re really looking at the start of a new chapter of the show,” new showrunner Angela Kang recently detailed, speaking about the season’s time jump. “We’ll explore what happened as man made objects and structures break down. Infrastructure like roads and bridges are changing and crumbling. And we’ll also explore what happens as resources are getting low.”

She continued, “There’s a fun Western vibe that has emerged. We are going into a period where a lot of the things that we’ve seen in previous seasons have broken down, so they’ve got these horses and carriages that are being drawn around instead of cars. Things are lit with oil lamps. People are using different kinds of weaponry. There’s a real grittiness to it that I think will be fun and fresh for the viewers.”

“The Walking Dead” will return on October 7.