‘Fear The Walking Dead’ Stars Break Down Morgan and Madison’s Flipped Dynamic in the Season 8 Premiere

After nearly a year, Fear the Walking Dead is back on AMC for its final season — and there have been some big changes to the zombie post-apocalypse TV show. Spoilers for Fear the Walking Dead Season 8, Episode 1 “Remember What They Took From You” after this point, but thanks to a seven-year time-jump, Madison Clark (Kim Dickens) has been imprisoned by the militaristic PADRE… And Morgan Jones (Lennie James) is working for them.

It’s a flip from their dynamic in the Season 7 finale, which reintroduced Madison into the show and introduced her to Morgan for the first time.

“We saw at the end of season seven that [Morgan] was very committed to getting his daughter back, working with Madison to bring PADRE down,” co-showrunner Andrew Chambliss told Decider. “It was important to us that when we saw him here after seven years, the first thing on everyone’s mind would be what happened to Morgan? We get little hints of it in this episode, but it’s a question that will continue to be unfolded over the course of the season.”

Viewers got some strong hints indeed about the source of that change in the episode, which introduced actress Zoey Merchant as an aged-up Baby Mo, now eight-years-old and being raised and trained by PADRE. In flashbacks, we learned that Morgan managed to get his adoptive daughter away from PADRE and tried to raise her in a swamp, only to be overwhelmed by zombies — and subsequently gave her back to PADRE to keep her safe.

Though James loved working with the baby version of Mo in previous seasons, calling the previous child actress a “glorious little girl,” he was thrilled to exchange a real, often-confused baby and a prosthetic baby for an aged-up actress like Merchant.

“There are kid actors, there are all right kid actors, there are annoying kid actors, and there are actors. And Zoey Merchant is an actor,” James said. “She came to work… She was keen to learn. She wanted to take part in the stunts and the action. And she committed to it and she understood what her job was and why she was there. She wasn’t ignorant to the process. She’s a cracking little actress and she’s going to get better and better and better. And she’s got very good family support. She’s polite and courteous and respectful, funny as hell, cheeky, mischievous. And she was a huge amount of fun to be around. And she made playing the emotions that she and Morgan go through, she made it very easy because she’s a cracking kid.”

Morgan’s sacrifice for Mo is just the tip of the iceberg for what’s happened to him, and Chambliss teased that this change in character isn’t just about what happened in the seven-year time jump; it’s about what happened to him over “the course of his entire run in the Walking Dead universe.” That’s a pretty long time that doesn’t just include four seasons of Fear the Walking Dead but stretches all the way back to his appearance in the first episode ever of The Walking Dead.

This look back at the history of the character is something that Chambliss and co-showrunner Ian Goldberg discussed heavily with James, with Chambliss noting, “he was in on the arc from the very beginning. It was very important to him knowing that this was the final season of Fear to really land everything in a way that honored the character and his journey. Everything from his entrance, the way he looked, the way he carried himself was, for Lennie, all about filling in the gaps of what happened in the seven years. He understood why he was so defeated, and there are many conversations and a lot of story that we talked about with Lennie that doesn’t even make it on screen this season, but was all about giving him all those pieces he needed so that when we see him, we can just feel the fact that he’s a different person than we’ve seen before.”

Some of those connections, and reasons behind Morgan’s choices will be obvious to long-time fans of the character: between his first appearance on The Walking Dead, and when he popped up encountering Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) a few seasons later, he had lost his son Duane to the zombie apocalypse. Though that’s far from the last person Morgan has lost on the shows, it’s something that has haunted him and powered his storyline with Mo in particular. It leads to what James noted was a choice that, “is completely against his better judgment and completely against his morals,” specifically giving Mo over to PADRE. And it’s something that will continue to haunt him throughout Season 8.

It also flips that dynamic between Madison, who is now unburdened by her debt to PADRE since she knows both of her children are dead. And it has helped bond her to Morgan… Where Morgan helped free her emotionally in Season 7, she’s now attempting to do the same for him in Season 8.

“Working with Lennie James is incredible, and the writing has been brilliant this season,” Dickens said on the changed dynamic. “As long as you and the other actor are able to dance together in it and create it together, the flip makes sense. One’s helping the other survive, and then the other turns around and does it for the other when they need to. I think it’s the human resilience, the resilience of the human spirit, really, and, ‘Look, I can be for you what you were for me. I found it in myself through you.'”

James agreed with Dickens’ assessment, adding that, “One of the things I’m most proud of in season eight is the ups and downs, the bumps and the jostles, and the building of that interaction and relationship between Madison and Morgan. They have such clear and strong and identified histories that they both share. And also, there’s so much about each other that they don’t know. And there’s so much about each other that they know, but from other people, not from themselves. So every interaction in season eight is a new one, it’s a first.”

For Madison, Goldberg was careful to note that isn’t a clean break from where we remet her in Season 7. Like Morgan, PADRE broke her between her seeming death in Season 4, and the Season 7 finale. And through Morgan’s passion for saving Mo, she’s able to reignite some of her heroic fire. Only problem, as Goldberg says with a laugh, “that rescue mission didn’t go so well.” She’s been locked up in a basement over the course of seven years, experimented on by PADRE, and nearly devoid of human contact. When she meets the grown-up Mo, who is exploring the depths of the PADRE complex, it gives Madison a “reason to live.”

“But there’s still that weight of all the things that Madison has done in her past and whether she A, can be redeemed or B, can ever be seen as a leader by the very people that [she betrayed],” Goldberg continued. “What she’s done, can she be forgiven? Can she find a new reason to live and can she become a leader again? Morgan is going to be a huge part of that journey for her and vice versa, but they both are going to have to face their pasts head-on in order to step forward.”

Fear the Walking Dead airs Sundays at 9/8c on AMC and streams on AMC+.