FEAR ITSELF
In its third season, Fear The Walking Dead is about to get real...
We get all the intel on season three of Fear The Walking Dead.
Call it The Brady Bunch goes to hell… Over the last two years zombie fans have gotten to know the blended family of Fear The Walking Dead. The show’s first season saw them survive the fall of Los Angeles, and year two found them sailing to Mexico, where they faced new perils. Now on the cusp of their third season, Madison Clark, her children Nick and Alicia, and her boyfriend Travis – as well as their friends Victor Strand and Ofelia – are caught up in a new struggle mirroring a very real conflict: the border division between the US and its southern neighbour.
“The intention was always to get to the border and create the dynamics for a border story,” co-creator Dave Erickson tells Red Alert. “This was before the recent election in the States. We introduced the militia organisation at the end of the season. That’s gonna draw us into what is the incredibly vital yet violent area of the country now, and definitely so during the apocalypse.
“My intention was never to politicise, we don’t want to be up on our soapbox. That said, aside from the location, there are certain thematics that do feel timely, in terms of the choices Madison and company are willing to make. There’s an overlap and an echo of what’s been going on. Not just in the States, but throughout Europe as well, with the rise of populism and a sense of nationalism. These are all pertinent questions for the show this season.”
Complicating matters will be another family – the Otto clan – founders of a survivalist movement who’d long been planning to build a new nation when America fell. Erickson explains that, in true Walking Dead fashion, this season will examine how much humanity one is willing to sacrifice in order to live among the dead.
“They suffer some losses in the first couple of episodes of this season. Maddy really doubles down on the idea that she needs to be more soulless if she’s going to survive and protect her children. What she comes to see over the course of the season is that in an effort to preserve and protect her family she actually compromises it that much more. It’s very much about a woman who gets to a place where she’s seemingly devoid of mercy. In the back half of this season she has to find a way to pull herself back from that and hopefully find some modicum of redemption.
“And then there are zombies,” adds the showrunner (who’s already announced he’s stepping down after this season to work on another TV project). “We’re a couple of months into the apocalypse now and we’re going to be
seeing more decay. Because we’re in the South-West and because it’s definitely more arid in a desert environment there’s sometimes an effort to make them a little more desiccated, a little more mummified. Just to give them a bit of a specific look. So we’ve caught up with certain elements of The Walking Dead in that regard. In the premiere we actually have the biggest zombie gag we’ve yet done… We’re at a place right now where the wave of the infected is gonna catch up with us in a very profound and violent way.”
Fear The Walking Dead’s third season comes to UK screens on 5 June on AMC, exclusive to BT.
We’ve caught up with certain elements of The Walking Dead