What lies ahead for Fear the Walking Dead

Showrunner David Erickson goes into detail about the second half of the second season of Fear the Walking Dead.

In an interview with the Hollywood Reporter, Erickson gives some insight into the midseason premiere as well as the upcoming episodes and the new dynamics between the characters.

The first episode of the second half of this season focused on Nick Clark, his journey of survival, and his eventual discovery of a new community. Erickson had this to say about Nick’s journey:

“In the beginning of the season, having survived that, there’s still an element — and you’ll see it in future episodes — there’s still a certain element of recklessness in his choices. I think he comes off of this episode feeling like his sense has been reaffirmed to a certain degree. It’s almost as though if that journey didn’t kill him, nothing can. But he’s going to come back to Earth over the course of the back half of the season. He ends up in a much different place by the finale.”

Fear the Walking Dead now has three different groups of characters on their own, contending with each other as well as the zombie apocalypse. Erickson discussed the fragmented nature of the rest of the episodes:

“Yes. We had a situation in the first seven episodes where our entire family was together, and it sometimes felt there were certain storylines that were not being served in specific episodes. By breaking up the family and fracturing the unit, it gives us an opportunity to spend more time and do more of a rotation. So, yes, this is a very Nick centric episode. In subsequent episodes, we’ll lean more heavy into Madison and Strand, or Travis and Chris, and ultimately we’ll begin to bring them back together by the end of the season — but we won’t see a fully uniform family until somewhere in season three. Possibly!”

Erickson also talked about the themes the season will be exploring, those of home and family, and how these would come to play in various ways with the different groups:

“In the back half, it has a lot do with place and home. We’ll see Madison attempt to create something, not only to protect Alicia, but also the thing about Nick is that he’s left before. Pre-apocalypse Nick would leave for weeks on end, but he always had a place to come back to. At this time in their relationship, there isn’t. Madison is going to look for a home base and something for her son to return to, which will be challenging for Alicia. She’ll force Madison to confront this notion that she keeps backing the child who leaves, and I don’t, so what’s that about? For Nick, it’s similar. He’s looking for a place where he’s at home, at a certain comfort level, and people understand where he’s at. That’s much of what his relationship with the colonia comes down to. And the thing about Chris, the thing he fears most, and it seems almost insignificant in the face of some of what he’s done and what this world is — the thing that he’s most afraid of is not having a structure surrounding him. He’s always been alienated, and now, faced with a family that thinks he’s a killer, which he is, it makes him that much more confused and that much more upset and enraged at times. For Travis, it’s really about finding a place in which he can heal. It’s not so much about… the obvious place to go would be that they’re all fractured, so now how do we bring them all back together? Ultimately, that’s not really the driving force. It’s about how do we settle in and create some architecture and safety. Thematically, that’s what we were stretching to reach across these three storylines.”

More twists and turns are up for the rest of Fear the Walking Dead, including the possibility of seeing Daniel Salazar again, despite his seeming death at the end of the first season.

Fear the Walking Dead season two airs every Sunday on AMC.