'The Walking Dead' Season 8 premiere was full of easter eggs, but you probably missed the best one

One of them is super sneaky.
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Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

The Walking Dead's Season 8 premiere also happened to be the show's 100th episode, which gave the producers a perfect excuse to slip in some easter eggs and callbacks to the previous 99 episodes as an extra treat for fans.

Skybound Entertainment, the company behind Robert Kirkman's Walking Dead comics, did all of us egg hunters a solid and spliced together a side-by-side comparison video that reveals just how much inspiration director Greg Nicotero drew from the show's series premiere, using Rick's son, Carl, to parallel his father's journey seven years after the fact.

There are other obvious homages too; as Nicotero told Entertainment Weekly, "Even the shot down on Rick in the future Alexandria sequence and the flowers next to the bed — we put all those in there to mirror the first episode. The electrocuted walker that has been fused to the electrical wire — we used Joe Giles who was one of the first walkers in the original show, the one that gets out of the bus and follows Rick down the street. I thought it would be cool to go back to our roots and use some of the same walkers that were in early episodes again as just a little tribute."

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Original image has been replaced. Credit: Mashable

Giles wasn't the only walker Nicotero brought back for the 100th episode; as HuffPost confirmed, the Season 8 premiere featured the actress who played the show's very first zombie, Summer, the little girl that Rick shot in the opening minutes of the series premiere.

Zombies might not age, but the actress, Addy Miller, is now all grown up, which enabled her to get killed by Andrew Lincoln twice, sporting the same wounds and a similar costume the second time around.

Another fun fact? Lincoln didn't even know that Miller was returning.

“They had to film me separately from Andrew because he’s known to spill some spoilers, so they had me in hiding the whole time so the crew couldn’t even know,” Addy told HuffPost.

Maybe if the show makes it to 200 episodes, they'll let her go three for three.

The Walking Dead airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on AMC.

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