The first season of The Walking Dead‘s spin-off show Fear The Walking Dead copies The Walking Dead in that it only featured six episodes. Now that the show has made it through its rocky first season, season two will follow the AMC trend of two half-seasons making up a full second season, with seven episodes on each side of the divide.
And one burning question fans of zombie apocalypse shows have as they decide whether or not Fear The Walking Dead deserves their time and attention? Will the show end on another cliffhanger like the controversial last episode of The Walking Dead season six?
According to Fear The Walking Dead showrunner Dave Erickson, “The short answer is … yes.” Another less than inspiring quote: Erickson felt that The Walking Dead “season finale ending was awesome.”
“You want something monumental that will beg people to come back,” he told the Hollywood Reporter. “You also need something that feels organic and driven. The ideal cliffhanger, the ideal churn for any show — and this can be a novel or a TV show or a movie — but you want it to feel inevitable. You want that moment of shock and surprise, but when you catch your breath, you want to feel that yes, there’s no other way that could have gone down. That’s always the goal.”
“So yes, in that regard, when we get to the writers’ room and start building out a season, it’s always with an eye toward something that is going to close out that chapter and make the first seven episodes feel satisfying, but also something that in so doing it also lays the seeds for what’s going to come in the back half.”
Let’s not let our hatred for The Walking Dead‘s Lucille tease cliffhanger spoil things for all cliffhangers, though. Season four of The Walking Dead had an amazing cliffhanger, with Rick and his gang of survivors captured and locked up in a railroad car. That had a lot of similar elements to it that people hated about the season six finale — everything building up to the arrival in Terminus, no resolution to the situation, and the gang left in a dire situation.
But it worked because it didn’t feel like a giant dick around. So even though Fear The Walking Dead is gonna pull the old cliffhanger routine on us before disappearing for six months, it could still be a good cliffhanger. Right? Right??
(Via the Hollywood Reporter)
