We have already shared our feelings on the season four premiere of Fear the Walking Dead (it’s very good), so let’s turn to one thing we couldn’t discuss before the premiere: The plot details.
Why Did Morgan leave The Walking Dead?
As we expected based on the midseason premiere of The Walking Dead, Morgan found that he could no longer live around other people. While Morgan still feels invincible, he fears he’s a danger to everyone else around him and opts, initially, to move to Jadis’ old stomping grounds at the Junkyard. Still suffering from PTSD over the death of his wife and son, Morgan could not be convinced by Jesus, Carol, or Rick to return to The Kingdom, The Hilltop, or Alexandria. “I lose people, and then I lose myself,” Morgan tells Althea.
Ultimately, rather than stick around and allow his friends to repeatedly try and coax him back home, Morgan decides to leave Virginia. Morgan, however, is clearly still feeling the effects of PTSD, as evidenced by the fact that he “needs to know” what the walkers look like before he kills them, as though he is still searching for someone, or for closure. Morgan is also back to his old, “I don’t kill” ways.
How Did Morgan Get to Texas?
He ran. He walked. And he ran some more. There is no grand mystery here. Morgan walked away from Alexandria, and he kept walking until he arrived in Texas. That’s about 1,400 miles, for the record. That might sound like a long way to walk, and it is, but if Morgan walked 3 miles an hour, eight hours a day, he’d reach Texas in a little less than two months.
Are the timelines between the two shows synced now?
Yes, for the moment. Fear the Walking Dead jumped ahead two or three years to line up with The Walking Dead, but that doesn’t mean that The Walking Dead won’t jump ahead in time next season — as it does in the comics — and fall out of sync again. It also does not mean that Fear the Walking Dead will remain on this timeline. We still do not know how the Fear characters survived the dam breaking in the third season finale, or how they found their way to Texas, so that will almost certainly be explored in future episodes in flashbacks.
Where exactly is Fear set now?
The trailers for the new season show that the characters take up camp in Dell Diamond Baseball Stadium, which is in Round Rock, Texas. That is outside of Austin and not Houston, as teased at the end of last season of Fear the Walking Dead. In fact, the minor league team that occupies of that baseball field during the season is the Round Rock Armadillos, which redesigned its uniforms to pay homage to The Walking Dead and, specifically, Negan’s barbed-wire bat.
What Is Althea’s Story?
Althea, like Morgan, remains cagey about her backstory, so we don’t know much about her yet, other than the fact that she “collects stories.” Who she collects stories for remains a mystery, but I like to think her character is a nod to World War Z, Max Brooks’ oral history of the zombie war. That is to say, she is collecting stories for future generations, should they manage to survive the zombie apocalypse. But ultimately, we don’t know why she is collecting them, nor do we know how she came into possession of the SWAT van with the machine guns, a pressing question of Morgan’s.
What’s John Dorie’s Story?
Garret Dillahunt’s character is the most intriguing new addition to emerge from the opening episode. We only know that he’s been completely alone since “something bad” happened that separated him from Laura, a woman he met and grew close to (who is definitely not the Savior, Laura, from The Walking Dead). He’s been alone for at least a year, searching for her, and all he has to go on is a matching pistol and a shared fondness for hard candy. The search for Laura will be one of the major storylines this season, although we can say for certain that she is not another new character who has not yet been introduced to series played by Jenna Elfman. Elfman’s character’s name is Naomi. It’s worth noting, too, that John has found a soulmate in Morgan, as John doesn’t kill unless he has to, either.
What’s the deal with the Clark family?
We can surmise from the last few seconds of the episode that Strand, Alicia, and Nick survived the dam breaking. We can also assume, because Daniel is not present, that he did not survive the third-season finale. We can further assume that at some point, Nick found Luciana. Beyond that, we can’t even hazard a guess based on what’s in the episode, aside from the fact that they use Alicia to fake an injury in an effort to ambush vehicles driving into their area. Neither the trailers nor this episode has given us much to go on, as only one of the new characters (Morgan) appears with an old character (Nick) in any of the trailers or images of the new season, so far.
Where is Madison?
That’s another unknown. We have seen her in trailers, but those shots may be from flashbacks. Madison may be dead, she may be hanging back at the baseball field, or she may have gotten separated from her group. Her whereabouts are meant to be left a mystery (but she is definitely not Alpha).
