Comic-Con 2018: Fear the Walking Dead Panel Recap – Today’s News: Our Take

Fear the Walking Dead is in the middle of a bumpy season, to say the least. The Walking Dead spin-off struggled to find its own identity in its first three seasons as a “companion” series to the original massive hit, but underwent a massive creative overhaul in Season 4 with new showrunners, a new cast, a crossover from The Walking Dead in Morgan (Lennie James) and a new tone.

Immediately, the results were positive and gave the series new life. But over the course of Season 4, Fear killed off two main characters — Nick (Frank Dillane) and Madison (Kim Dickens) — which didn’t sit well with some of the franchise’s finicky fans, who saw the deaths as pointless.

However, the show is moving forward and continuing to stake out its own feel that fits in the Walking Dead universe but also doesn’t feel like a repeat of what fans will see on The Walking Dead, while also leaning into what makes the genre interesting to viewers.

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“We want to make sure that Fear the Walking Dead has its own identity,” said producer and effects guru Greg Nicotero at the Fear the Walking Dead panel at San Diego Comic-Con. “Everything that we do, we want to make sure that you guys are getting a different experience.”

For this back half of Season 4, that means even more new cast members, including 12 Monkeys‘ Aaron Stanford and comedian Mo Collins.

“They’re going to bring very different energies to the show. Some are going to bring humor, some are going to bring hope. [The new characters] will bring a lot of variety to the show,” said new co-showrunner Andrew Chambliss. And if you watch the new trailer (above), you’ll see that humor in full effect. Case in point: zombies being blown away by a storm!

Lennie James, Fear the Walking DeadPhoto: Ryan Green/AMC

That storm will present problems for the survivors, too. The Walking Dead has largely made zombies and other communities the main problem for characters, but this back half of Season 4 will see the elements causing havoc (and funny how I just realized we’ve never seen a hurricane in the sweaty south of The Walking Dead).

“When we last left our characters at the end of Season 4A, they were around a campfire, they seemed to be together but there was a lot of unresolved issues,” co-showrunner Ian Goldberg said. “They have questions about what they mean to each other, to themselves, how they could make up for everything they did. These are really weighty existential questions, so we thought we’d make it more fun to answer them by throwing walkers at them at 200 miles per hour.”

“I swear you guys have a vendetta against me,” Alycia Debnam-Carey, who plays Alicia, said to Goldberg and Chambliss, after a round of “Happy Birthday” was sung to her. “Every single episode I’m in water, or a hurricane or a basement somewhere.” As for shooting the storm scenes, she said, “It’s fun when you read it on paper, but the reality of shooting something like that, it’s uncomfortable. Super fun looking back, but at the time it’s a lot.”

The issue of Madison’s death didn’t really come up, but Debnam-Carey did talk about how Madison’s absence will shape her character. And we’ll see that in a special episode that is entirely devoted the Alicia that Debnam-Carey called “the most rewarding episode of television ever.” We’ll see Alicia on her own as the last surviving member of the Clark family. “I mean can she keep going?” she asked. “And if she can is she going to be more like her mother, is she going to be able to step into those shoes, is she going to be better, is she going to be worse, is she going to be able to come back from that darkness? We’ve seen her in that dark place and it’s only going to get worse before it gets better. It’s like a capsule episode and we really get to see into her mind.”

Fear the Walking Dead returns Sunday, Aug. 12 on AMC.

Additional reporting by Lindsay MacDonald.