A roller-coaster ride of blood and more blood
Deciding just who will die on Fear the Walking Dead is not made lightly — or comfortably
Robert Kirkman completely understands why fans get passionately upset when one of his beloved characters meets his or her maker.
He feels your pain. Widespread death is a reality in the scorched zombie-ridden worlds Kirkman created for his comic books and their TV adaptations, AMC’s Walking Dead and its prequel spinoff, Fear the Walking Dead.
People die all the time. But deciding just who will die is not made lightly. Or comfortably.
Kirkman says there’s always that unsettling moment in the writers’ room when it dawns on the scribes that a certain character may not be long for this post-apocalyptic world.
“It’s an organic process,” he says. “When it starts to show itself, you get kind of nervous. You’ll be plotting out a story and you start to see that the most important thing or the biggest catalyst that could lead more story is a particular death. It’s at that very moment where you start to get upset about it. There’s regret that sneaks in and all kinds of emotions, on this side of things. We usually have to spend weeks and months solidifying it, making sure it is the path we want to go down and it’s definitely the thing we need to do.”
Kirkman is on the phone to promote Season 3 of Fear the Walking Dead, which kicks off Sunday on AMC. To be clear, he is not talking about any impending or specific death on Fear the Walking Dead or even the Walking Dead, just the general “you-never-know-when-yourtime-is-up” phenomenon that permeates both series.
In Fear the Walking Dead, the apparent demise of the young Christopher Manawa (Lorenzo James Henrie), in Season 2 may not have had the seismic impact on viewers as, say, Glenn Rhee’s gruesome death in the Walking Dead’s seventh season. But it still had an impact.
“If you’re only telling stories that make fans happy, well fans are going to get bored at that point,” Kirkman says. “It really does have to be a roller-coaster ride. When a beloved character dies and they’re upset, you’re supposed to be upset. The fact that you are upset tells me we’re doing our job.”
Kirkman co-created Fear the Walking Dead with showrunner Dave Erickson back in 2015, as a prequel and companion piece to the Walking Dead, which was based on the comic books he created with Tony Moore and Charlie Adlard.
Kirkman is an executive producer and writer for both shows. Just as the original series arguably hit its stride in Season 3 with the introduction of beloved characters, including memorable villains, Kirkman says Fear the Walking Dead’s third season will be a game-changer as well.