Plus more on the upcoming season, including a fantastic new poster and how the series lines up with the timeline of 'The Walking Dead.'
If you're not caught up on the events of season one of AMC's Fear the Walking Dead, turn back now lest ye be spoiled since we're about to delve into the fates of everyone who managed to survive to see season two. While The Walking Dead is currently smack in the middle of its sixth season, its companion show will kick off on Sunday, April 10th, a week after the original's season finale. Both shows will be followed up by Talking Dead.
Season two will pick up with Travis (Cliff Curtis), Madison (Kim Dickens) and their family as newcomer and series regular Strand (Colman Domingo) takes them to his extravagant yacht. As L.A. burns, the survivors must deal with their new surroundings and the people they find themselves living alongside, not to mention the ever-rising threat of the walking dead. In a chat with THR, showrunner Dave Erickson teased viewers about what they can expect to see in season two of Fear the Walking Dead, which picks up after a short time jump.
Image via AMC
"It's not going to be a dramatic time jump," says Erickson.
In the wake of what's going on in Los Angeles, I didn't want to abandon the city without some residue about what it was like to lose the city. I wanted the audience to have an introduction to the boat.
And if you're wondering about the boat, he says they'll be spending a good amount of time on it throughout the season's 15 episodes. That's certainly something we haven't seen the survivors of The Walking Dead do yet, and the boat will play into the season's theme as well:
One of the big questions thematically is: what is family now? Is it blood or is it bond? We're going to have a group of people, some of whom don't know each other very well — Strand is still an enigma who may or may not have his own agenda and intentions when they get onto the boat. … It provides for this interesting balance of paranoia and anxiety, which is not dissimilar from last season but we're now on a boat in the middle of the ocean and that's going to give us a lot of drama for first few episodes.
Image via AMC
The other big question for the first half of the season is where do we go? There's a difference between being land-bound and going from town to town and being stuck. The great thing about this boat is we have a wide range of places we could go and a lot of this will feed into the agendas our characters and the things they're keeping to themselves. It will drive a lot of the tension for the first half of the season.
Finally, it is about finding hope. It's about having gone through all these loses — where do we go? Where can we start over? And can we start over? We talked a lot last season about the overlap between our story and Rick's (Andrew Lincoln in the flagship) coma. If you count the days in season one, Rick hasn't woken up yet going into season two. We've completed part of our apocalyptic education and we now know the dead are dead. Even Travis has to come to terms with that. But they don't know how bad it is elsewhere; they've heard snippets. Part of what they're doing is trying to find what safe harbor might be out there.
That certainly sets up an interesting conflict for our heroes to face, one which will result in "a rather explosive turn in the finale of the first half of the season." Be that as it may, the main goal of the writers is to "hold this family together," but time will tell if that's possible. The zombie apocalypse puts enough pressure on people without forcing them to live together on a boat, and new additions to the group of survivors may cause further tension that threatens to fracture family ties.
Image via AMC
On the fun side, if you were wondering whether or not the zombies of Fear the Walking Dead can swim:
They can't swim. Zombies can wade and that's something we experimented with in the first couple episodes; it has a lot to do with decomposition and gas buildup in the body. Here's what it's not going to be: We're not doing the Love Boat with zombies. Every episode will not be a new port of call; there's no Juliette McCoy. We are going to go to land and we are going to have a balance between sea and land.
The important distinction and reason for that is because we will come to realize that there's a lot of people who have the same idea we did. We're on a vessel that's something to be coveted. It's something that in theory allows them to survive. We realize quickly that the dangers on the ocean are equal to if not greater than the dangers on land. And that's going to put us in a place where we're stuck between the two.
For more on season two, including possible destinations for our heroes, teases about Operation Cobalt, and the eventual body count, be sure to head over to THR for the full interview. In the meantime, check out the new Season 2 poster for AMC's Fear the Walking Dead below:
For more on Fear the Walking Dead, be sure to check out some of our recent coverage below:
