One Last Scare: ‘Fear the Walking Dead’ Stars Preview the Final Season

When asked whether she stole anything from the set on the final season of Fear the Walking Dead, Kim Dickens gets a wicked smile on her face and jumps out of her chair, before returning holding one of Madison Clark’s oversized hammers from the show.

“Let me see,” Dickens says, repeatedly slapping the shaft of the hammer on her palm. “You mean this?”

Turns out it’s just a stunt hammer that Dickens is brandishing over Zoom (though she also has several real versions of the iconic weapon), but if anyone deserves to take home a piece of TV history, it’s Dickens. The longest-standing cast member of AMC’s eight-season-long hit zombie spinoff, Dickens’s character Madison was summarily killed off in Season 4 only to return very much alive in a surprise appearance at the end of Season 7. Now in its eighth and final season, the series is once again putting the matriarch of the Clark-Manawa family front and center, dealing with her worst nightmare: an organization called PADRE that is stealing children. For a show that has always been about a family, first, it’s a fitting close to the series — and one that was thankfully planned well in advance.

“We knew season eight was going to be the final season well before we started production on it,” co-showrunner Andrew Chambliss told Decider. “As we broke the story, we always had in mind that we were building to a conclusion for the series. That was always factored into the storytelling, from the very beginning.”

Split over two, six-episode long installments — the first of which premieres on AMC on Sunday, May 14 at 9/8c, aka Mother’s Day — a seven-year time jump finds the characters we have followed for the past eight seasons in a very different place emotionally, and physically thanks to the threat of PADRE. Once searched for as a safe haven by our apocalyptic survivors, PADRE instead has turned out to be anything but safe.

As introduced in Season 7, PADRE is all about taking children before they form a familial bond, stripping that away in order to hone these children to be the perfect soldiers. That connection between how Fear started in Season 1 focusing on Madison, her husband Travis (Cliff Curtis), and their two children — now all long since dead — out of their depth as the zombie apocalypse began, versus a threat that strips those family bonds and makes the survivors ultra-prepared was definitely by design.

“We very much wanted the final season to be about family, about the family you build, about the family you find, about the family that you’re sometimes stuck with,” Chambliss noted. “PADRE, in opposition to that allows a lot of our characters to ask the questions of themselves about who’s important to them, who’s worth fighting for, and take stock of who they have, who they’ve lost, who they are now because they’ve lost the people, what they carry with them from the people they have left behind. PADRE’s philosophy allows our characters to reflect on all those thematics that we feel are really part of the fabric of the show.”

For Madison, this final threat finds her, “in a place where Madison’s never been before,” according to Dickens. In her return episode last season, she was broken in mind and body, using a mask and oxygen tank to breathe thanks to nearly dying in a stadium fire back in Season 4. But after helping fellow survivor Morgan Jones (Lennie James) in the season finale she’s now in “probably her darkest place” after betraying PADRE. “It’s about reconciliation and redemption and how does the character find their way back to themselves, if they do at all?” Dickens continued. “That journey, I think, is fascinating.”

Madison is definitely front and center in the season premiere, but viewers will quickly discover her dynamic with Morgan, who had taken the lead with both the group in the show and on the series itself after spinning out of the mothership show The Walking Dead, has flipped. While Madison is “putting [herself] back together,” Morgan, for reasons that will be revealed, is more broken than he ever has been before. And that’s saying something for a character who frequently went into fits of madness after his son Duane died between appearances on The Walking Dead.

“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,” James said. “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… And playing it with Kim, getting to hang out, getting to find a way that we can work together was just, it was a boon. It was like the early days of the show when we were all not knowing the landscape and what everything was. There was a freshness to it that I really enjoyed.”

While Dickens might be the longest-running character on Fear the Walking Dead, albeit with a significant gap in the middle, James plays the longest-running character in the Walking Dead universe, having appeared opposite Andrew Lincoln in the pilot episode of the original show (that record will be taken away once the upcoming Rick Grimes and Michonne spinoff series starring Lincoln premieres in 2024). Though he hasn’t appeared on the mothership show since Season 8, the finale of The Walking Dead last year and the finale of Fear the Walking Dead this year are, of course, intrinsically tied in James’ mind. When asked about how he felt about ending the latter show, James noted, “It’s a bit like when I heard that The Walking Dead show was coming to end. There was a moment of surprise, there was a moment of contemplation. But a part of me expects every season to be the final season, if I’m absolutely honest.”

Other actors on the show had very different takes on wrapping things up. Jenna Elfman, who plays all-purpose former nurse June noted that “I got a little sad only because it’s just so much fun to work on… I want to keep playing with my friends.” Rubén Blades, who has played not-so-sneaky badass Daniel Salazar since Season 1 was a little more pragmatic.

“I was not surprised in the sense that I know things begin and end,” Blades said. “It’s eight seasons. Some people feel like they express that this is a cancellation, and I thought ‘Cancellation? We had eight seasons.’ I don’t think there’s going to be shows in the future that are going to last eight seasons, frankly, the way everything is and now streaming. So I wasn’t exactly surprised. I just think that there will be life after for all The Walking Dead universe through spinoffs and special shows. So I don’t feel that this is the end of Salazar. I just think that it’s the end of this story, of this part of the story with these characters, and you got to move on. So I didn’t feel particularly hurt or anything.”

Just because Blades might not feel hurt doesn’t mean his character — and all the characters on the show — aren’t about to be put through the wringer one more time. PADRE is a physical and existential threat that will challenge the whole group going forward. And while the first episode of the new season seems to embrace the pseudo-anthology format the series has been running under Chambliss and fellow co-showrunner Ian Goldberg for the past several seasons, in the first three episodes provided to press, things start to snowball out of control very quickly.

Credit a large part of that to Chambliss and Goldberg, who wrote the bulk of the first half of the season, and episodes in the second half as well — a rarity for the showrunners, who will usually tackle season premieres and finales, with only spotty episodes in between.

“A big part of that was knowing it was the final season and knowing where we want to get to by the end of the run and this also a 12-episode season, so we had a little bit less real estate to do it, it just helped focus the story,” Chambliss noted. “In many ways I think we still approached the episodes with the core of what we would do in the anthology episodes, where each one would be from one character’s point of view and take them on a journey. But I think the difference here is that the different storylines converge much faster.”

As those storylines converge, chances are we’ll have to say goodbye to some of the characters who have graced our screens for multiple seasons at this point. Or will we? With The Walking Dead universe rapidly expanding into multiple spinoff series, as Blades mentioned, even with some possible big character deaths before Fear gives us one last scare, there’s always the potential for flashbacks and prequels. Elfman noted that since TWD is “a happy playground for me,” she would be delighted to come back for more June, while Blades seemed downright eager to return to the role of Daniel Salazar (“there are stories that are still pending,” Blades noted intriguingly on where he leaves Salazar in the already shot final episode of the series). Dickens also left things open with a “never say never,” which makes sense for an actress who played a character who died and came back, three seasons later.

But for Lennie James, who has now played Morgan Jones on and off since 2010, this is probably his final curtain call for the character — at least for the foreseeable future.

“I feel like I’ve said all there is to say about Morgan,” James mused. “That isn’t to say that I wouldn’t return to the role. But if I did return to the role, it would truly have to be because someone shows me something I haven’t said… I’ve shown him on the toilet. I’ve shown him in good times and bad times. I’ve shown him vaguely happy and extremely unhappy. I’ve done him wet, cold, hot, angry, mischievous, brave, cowardly, broken, in love, out of love, scared of love, father. I’ve run the gamut with this guy and I’m very, very proud of what I tried to do and what I hope I’ve achieved. So it’s done. And if it’s not done, it’s because someone’s shown me something I forgot to do.”

One thing James didn’t forget to do? Take his own memento from the set. But unlike Dickens, James wasn’t ready to offer up exactly what it was. Teasing that he “did steal something from the set,” James noted that “all I can say is they didn’t miss it because they had loads of them,” and “it didn’t belong to me or my character.” Added James, “If anybody guesses it right, I will give them a prize.” But, he was careful to add, that prize will not be the item he stole from the set.

“No, you can’t have the thing because it’s the reason I stole the thing, is because I wanted the thing,” James continued. “But I’ll give you a different prize. I don’t know what that is yet, but I’ll come up with something.”

Fingers crossed it’s one of Madison’s hammers.

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