The Fear the Walking Dead is getting closer to The Walking Dead timeline, but not by much. The spinoff’s showrunner Dave Erickson recently explained to TV Line they want the series to take its time when it comes to zombie training.
One of the biggest complaints about Fear the Walking Dead is the pacing of the show. The characters can seem a little slow to learn zombie 101, but that’s the point. Fear the Walking Dead doesn’t want its characters to be zombie slayers right away. They want to take their time developing their character’s survival skills.
“By the end of the first [zombie movie] reel, everybody knows the score and is able to kill [the undead] without any thought,” Erickson told TV Line. “They become very practiced at it very quickly. And that was something we wanted to avoid. We wanted to [instead] try to balance expectations of how people should behave once they know there are zombies with this sort of attempted slow burn into the apocalypse from a character standpoint.”
Erickson added, “That creates frustrations, to a certain degree, because in some instances, you want [the characters] to get it already. And in some circumstances, the things that they do that don’t seem particularly zombie-savvy are, for me, moments where they aren’t zombie-savvy.”
At this point in the series, they’re not yet at the point where Rick Grimes awakens from his coma in Atlanta, but they’re close. Soon the Fear the Walking Dead will know how to survive the new world.
"If you marked off the days [that have passed on air since Fear the Walking Dead debuted], I think right now, by the end of the first half [of Season 2], we’re getting very close to Rick waking up in Georgia," Erickson told TVLine. "[ Fear The Walking Dead survivors have] arrived at a place where they’re up to speed on how one deals with the apocalypse and the dead."
Fear the Walking Dead Season 2 returns at 9 p.m, Aug. 21. on AMC.
