(Warning: Heavy Fear The Walking Dead Spoilers below.)
Last night’s season finale of Fear the Walking Dead ended in a doozy of a cliffhanger. At the end of the episode, Morgan’s life is left hanging in the balance after he is shot by Ginny and left for dead. In the final seconds of the episode, Morgan delivers what he believes will be his final words into a walkie-talkie as several zombies converge upon him.
Does he live or does he die? Is Lennie James, who plays Morgan, leaving just Fear the Walking Dead, or will his character be entirely killed off, so that he leaves the entire The Walking Dead universe altogether?
Showrunners Ian Goldberg and Andrew Chambliss gave an interview to The Hollywood Reporter, and reporter Josh Wigler tried in vain to get an answer to that question, or even to get Goldberg and Chambliss to offer a hint. The showrunners, however, steadfastly refused to answer the question, delivering a variation of “we’ll have to see what happens in season 6” on several occasions:
Ian Goldberg: So, whether or not he’s able to take his own advice and live by those words “just live,” we’ll have to see what happens in season 6.
…
Andrew Chambliss: Like Ian said, people are just going to have to wait and see if Morgan is going to be able to get out of the dire predicament he is in.
…
Goldberg: Whether those are his final words or whether the group even heard them and what they choose to do with them in season six is a question we’ll just have to see when we get there.
…
Chambliss: Whether or not Morgan survives is something viewers are going to have to wait until season six to find out.
…
Chambliss: We’ll just have to wait for season six to see how things go.
In other words, Goldberg and Chambliss refused to budge. The showrunners weren’t any more enlightening on that question in an interview with Deadline, where they also refused to offer any hints. In an interview with the Insider, they were only slightly more forthcoming:
He was bleeding quite a bit from that wound. And, he also had walkers encroaching on him. So you know, whether it’s in the shoulder or the heart, it’s a bad gunshot wound and it’s not going to be one that he could easily survive.
So, he’s going to die? “That’s just something people are going to have to wait and see,” the showrunners said.
In other words, the showrunners had no new insights to provide in interviews following the episode. However, it is worth noting that after Glenn’s fake-out death on The Walking Dead, Scott Gimple coughed up enough so that viewers knew he was still alive within the first 10 minutes of The Talking Dead. I think if Morgan were going to be around for another season of Fear the Walking Dead, we’d probably know. It is worth noting, however, that he did not appear in this week’s episode of The Talking Dead, where departing characters almost always appear after their deaths. He was also not in the In Memoriam montage, although that’s not surprising since he didn’t technically die in the episode. Theories about Morgan’s future, meanwhile, have run amok, and range from being picked up by CRM (the helicopter people), to being saved by Madison or even Sherry — is that who Dwight was actually talked to on the walkie in the beginning of the episode?
I still maintain based on all of this season’s evidence that Morgan will die, but I suppose we’ll just have to “wait until season six” to find out for sure.
