‘Walking Dead’ Spoilers: Writer Explains Timeline Between Shows

One of the most frustrating things for many Walking Dead fans early on in the spinoff Fear the Walking Dead is the fact that characters do some really dumb things in the face of the zombie apocalypse. While their decisions make sense, fans have no choice but to compare them to the decisions made by Rick Grimes and the characters on the original Walking Dead series.

The problem is that is really unfair because the characters on Fear the Walking Dead are not police officers like Shane was, or have someone who can teach them survival skills and they have no idea what is going on, while Rick comes across Shane and company after they have been fighting for survival for a month already.

Dave Erickson is the showrunner and writer for Fear the Walking Dead, and Comic Book Resources reported that he talked about the two shows’ timelines recently. According to Erickson, Fear the Walking Dead is just now to the point where Rick first wakes up in the hospital from his coma.

Looking back on the first episode of The Walking Dead, fans can see clearly that Rick wasn’t always making the best decisions because he had no idea what was going on. What Fear the Walking Dead is now showing is what people from The Walking Dead were going through before Rick woke up, and they don’t have a character like Shane to protect them. There is no way they could have been prepared for zombies in the real world. Erickson understands the frustration from fans who are used to skilled zombie hunters.

“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.”

That is what happens when one show has seven seasons of characters learning how to survive in the post-apocalyptic world. Fear the Walking Dead is only in the middle of its second season, and it just now reached the timeline from the opening scene of that original series. As fans have seen with characters like Nick, the Fear the Walking Dead characters are finally learning how to deal with the undead zombies.

“If you marked off the days, 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. [The 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.”

That brings up some interesting thoughts. The original Walking Dead series just threw the fans into the world and they learned what happened at the same speed as Rick Grimes learned himself. That put the fans in the shoes of the hero and made the show very intense.

Fear the Walking Dead faced an uphill battle from the start. Fans already know what happened and they know things are not going to get better. That means the intensity and suspense are neutered due to expectations. Fear the Walking Dead has to rely on other storytelling cues, such as the family dynamic and the great idea to put them on the water on the West Coast instead of in the country on the East Coast.

Comicbook.com reported that Erickson wanted to make sure to put the Fear the Walking Dead characters in a more realistic spot when it comes to dealing with the zombie apocalypse.

“By the end of the first [zombie movie] reel, everybody knows the score and is able to kill [the undead] without any thought. 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.”

Now that Fear the Walking Dead has caught up with the starting point of The Walking Dead, the show should start to feel more familiar to fans of the original. Nick has learned he can walk among the dead and the rest of the cast understands how and why they need to kill the zombies. Fear the Walking Dead just needs to ensure it remains different from the original in order to justify its existence.

[Image via AMC]