Spoilers for Fear the Walking Dead’s Season 1 finale below.
Throughout Season 1 of Fear the Walking Dead, viewers got to watch a zombie outbreak and other assorted forms of heinousness take over the always sun-swept streets of Los Angeles, which was a polar opposite to the dark and woodsy locations seen on The Walking Dead. For Season 2, the show will be making an even bigger change to the setting when it takes the characters out to the ocean, via Strand’s yacht Abigail. But that might be a horrible decision, as explained by showrunner Dave Erickson.
First of all, getting to the yacht is going to be something of a challenge. And then the question becomes: Once we get to it, which way is it going to go? And we will discover that we were not the only ones with this bright idea. There are a lot of boats up and down the coastline of Southern California. So it will become very interesting when we get to see and discover that we’re not the only vessels out there, and there may be others that are covetous of what we have, which will have certain features that will be enviable to people that are trying to escape the zombie hordes.
Not that it was expected that these characters would have a lovely humdinger of a time in Season 2, but I love the fact that this assumed attempt at safety and salvation will lead to more problems, and ones that don’t often come up in the world of zombie fiction. A lot of fans of The Walking Dead over the years have pondered why the characters haven’t taken to the high seas to get away from mainland zombies, but there are just as many factors going against that idea as there are advantages.
For one, supplies and fuel are going to be somewhat limited, especially as time goes by. (At least, assuming every city on the coast didn’t just leave everything behind as they moved inland.) Plus, as Erickson brings up, Strand and the family squad definitely aren’t the only people who thought that a floating future was the best way to handle the epidemic, which will mean that any boats containing corpses will basically be death traps – which could be interesting – and any living people will basically just want everything that all other survivors have, especially if they’re in a smaller boat.
And then there’s that final question of what the endgame is. Would they just attempt to wait out the apocalypse and then head back to shore once the majority of the population had been weeded out? We know from The Walking Dead that years pass without any real sense of normalcy out in the wild, although things could possibly be different on the western side of the U.S., as well as on islands or in other countries.
As Erickson told EW, part of the thrust of the writer’s room for Season 1 was keeping the story close to the water, so that they would be able to use it in some way. So here’s hoping they locked down a solid plan for how the group’s yachting adventures will go in Season 2. And we also want to see the plane-bound micro-series Flight 462 match up with this new direction in a logical way.
Fear the Walking Dead Season 2 will premiere on AMC in 2016.
