After an opening first season of Fear the Walking Dead that had the best ratings for any first season in cable history, the series is set to return for its second season on April 10. While set in the same universe as The Walking Dead, there were clear distinctions between the mothership and its sister series during that first season. Fear the Walking Dead took us back to the beginnings of the outbreak, and introduced us to a different set of characters far less familiar with the threat imperiling them. The setting was different. The tone was different. Even the style of the two shows are distinct.
As Fear the Walking Dead moves into its second season, we will be introduced to another first in The Walking Dead universe: The ocean. Is it the “safe harbor” from a world overrun with zombies that the characters hope it will be, or is the threat just as menacing out on the open water?
We’ll find out on April 10. In the meantime, here are 10 questions our team has heading into the second season.
1. Will season two take place in the ocean?
According to showrunner Dave Erickson, the season will split time between land and sea. How will that work? Zombies cannot swim, so while the Clarks, Manawas, and Salazar families are on the yacht, presumably they are safe from walkers. However, there is the danger that others — particularly those crowded onto smaller boats — will want what they have. In order to escape the apocalyptic pirates or make supply runs, they will have to return to land, and the trailer certainly suggests that zombies are like most of us: They love the Southern California beaches. Even walkers like a nice tan.
Here’s the other problem with the nautical setting: A yacht is an enclosed space, a much smaller version of the arena in the season finale. That means, if one person dies and turns into a zombie, the virus could potentially spread quickly throughout the yacht, just as it did in the prison on The Walking Dead.
2. What is the deal with Strand?
Easily the most compelling character of the opening season was Colman Domingo’s Victor Strand. We don’t know much about him yet, except that he likes resourceful people, and he was wealthy enough working as a fixer in the pre-zombie apocalypse that he owns a beach house and a yacht. He also seems to know a lot more about zombies than other people. Unfortunately, he also may be a sociopath. We have no idea what his motives are, but we do know that he’s taking the rest of the survivors to a yacht.
3. Will season two continue to take place in Los Angeles?
We know that the second season will take place on water and land. However, we don’t know whether the land portion of the series will continue to be Los Angeles or somewhere else. We know that the second season was filmed in Baja, Mexico, but we don’t know yet if the series’ setting will relocate there or somewhere else.
4. Will the family who fights zombies together stay together?
One of the growing pains in the first season of Fear the Walking Dead involved how much the central family seemed to dislike each other. They always seemed to be at odds, disagreeing on how to confront the threat from the zombies. Though they were part of this new post-zombie world, the bickering among family members still resembled what was typical of family members pre-zombie.
However, when Daniel Salazar opened up a stadium full of zombies in the season finale, these people finally fought not with each other, but for each other. They made a plan, and they rallied around each other to execute it. They had finally started to become a team — the kind of family we see among disparate people on The Walking Dead. Will this continue into the second season, or will brother and sister, father and daughter, boyfriend and girlfriend continue to be at odds as they are faced with new and different threats?
5. Will Liza’s death bring these characters closer together?
It often takes a tragedy to bring people closer together, which was certainly true of The Walking Dead. Up until the death of Sophia in season two of The Walking Dead, it was considered primarily a grim action drama with cool zombie kills. However, as more characters died, we began to care more about the remaining characters and less about zombie deaths. Now in its sixth season, the zombies have almost become an afterthought on The Walking Dead. Liza’s death may be the point where Fear the Walking Dead starts heading in that direction. The moment Travis shot his ex-wife because she was infected on Fear the Walking Dead was brutal, but it also brought us closer to the remaining characters, and remaining characters closer to each other.
6. Which Travis will we see in season two?
Throughout most of the first season, Travis was reluctant to fight. He was trusting of the government, certain that the military had everything under control. After discovering that the military had planned to basically eradicate the entire city of Los Angeles to stop the spread of the zombie virus, something in Travis finally broke. He beat the hell out of Andrew for shooting Ofelia and finally joined the fight against the zombie apocalypse. The Travis that we saw in the season finale — the man who nearly beat a man to death — was a man who was beginning to understand his role in this world. He has to become a more aggressive, more pragmatic leader and he has to be less trusting. He needs to be this group’s Rick Grimes.
Speaking of Andrew, is there any chance he survived the beating and makes a return in season two?
7. Has Nick finally gotten over himself?
Consistently the most interesting and frustrating character of the first season was young Johnny Depp’s doppelgänger, Nick. While everyone else was freaking out about the end of the world, Nick too often was looking to get a fix, or sending his mom back to school to get him some drugs so he could wean himself off of his addiction. However, Nick turned a corner in the season finale, and at one point actually showed some selflessness, telling his mom to leave him and run when he was about to be devoured by zombies. Thankfully, she stuck around, and Nick survived his close encounter with the roamers, because no matter how self-involved Nick was in season one, he was still the most captivating character on the series (at least until Strand showed up). If Nicks learns how to use a weapon properly, he has the potential to become the series’ Daryl Dixon, a guy who couldn’t figure out how to live in the old world, but is a survivor well-suited to a world overrun by zombies.
8. Could Chris and Alicia become the Maggie and Glenn of Fear the Walking Dead?
It’s way too early to suggest that Chris and Alicia could ever fill those romantic shoes on Fear the Walking Dead. They are cute together, but of all the characters in the first season of The Walking Dead, there are only five left now. If Fear the Walking Dead is anything like its predecessor, we can expect a lot of turnover in the cast over the next few seasons. The odds that both Chris and Alicia survive, much less stay together as a potential couple, is slim to none.
9. Will Tobias return?
One of the most well-liked characters of the first season was Tobias, who was the only character early on who seemed to have a real sense of what was coming. He was only in the first two episodes before going his separate ways. We don’t know if he’s coming back in season two, but the actor who plays him, Lincoln A. Castellanos, has suggested he will return, it’s only a matter of when. “I don’t think it’s a question of if [Tobias will] come back, it’s really more of when. When will the time be right for him to return, and what condition will he return in?”
10. Who will join the cast from the Fear the Walking Dead web series?
AMC has been running Fear The Walking Dead: Flight 462, a 16-part web series online (and during The Walking Dead‘s commercial breaks) that takes place on a commercial jet, where the zombie threat has just gotten real. It seems likely that the plane will go down (in the most recent episode, No. 14, a window shattered opened). One of the people in the web series will survive the apparent plane crash and join the cast of Fear the Walking Dead in season two. Who will it be?
My money is either on this woman:
Or this guy:
Viewers who want to catch up on the web series before it ends in two weeks can watch the first 14 episodes here (they are each around one-minute long).
