The end is near for Fear the Walking Dead, I’ll still have to watch the last half of the last season, but I could have easily stopped watching after this episode and I would have been satisfied. That doesn’t necessarily mean that the show doesn’t have more stories to finish up, it is more that the characters I have attached to are not going to be involved in the last 6.
This episode ended up jamming through story points as it ended up being some sort of soft reset for the last half season. New main characters, new villain, new missions. We got here with lots of stuff packed in quick spurts. Morgan lost Grace, and indirectly lost Mo and in turn started to lose himself. He wrote on the train car walls with Grace’s blood, and was seen going crazy killing walkers when Madison got to him, until he tried to attack her and she had to knock him out.
The two went to the shipyard to try to help Mo, but he had an episode again there, followed by another one in the field, where he pierced Madison’s air tank, and after finding Mo he had another episode after telling her to leave. She doesn’t and pulls him into the house boat and he is locked up for like the third time this episode.
We see, or learn depending on how much you were paying attention to the season, the reasons that Shrike had the children try to kill the ‘carrion’. Besides knowing they brother and sister pair didn’t want to, they didn’t want to go face to face with their walker father, and after they looked around PADRE, Shrike insists that the coordinates are in the binoculars around their dad’s neck. This turned out to be 100% true which we learn after Madison saves Morgan from the houseboat, and the walker bites Shrike’s neck because she can’t kill her father in walker form.
After Madison smashes his head in she grabs the coordinates, it looks to be two or perhaps three pieces of paper. I was able to pause and get a pretty clear reading on page one. I wrote the areas down, one word was covered, but I didn’t bother to write the coordinates to look up that one. Will be interesting to see if these places pop up in the future world of Walking Dead.
The areas were, Desert Seed: Lea County, New Mexico, and Pinal County Arizona. Temperate Seed: Cut Island Bahamas, and Venado Mexico. Coastal Seed: (Word was covered by Madison’s Thumb) County, Oregon, and Gulf of Mexico.
From what I can recall, in the two year spin off a research facility is located in Oregon. I am starting to wonder if Madison covering the county name of Oregon was purely coincidence or something that will be an Easter egg in future programming. A lot of rapid fire happens after this, Shrike’s brother crumbles after hearing about Shrike and PADRE falls. Finch ends up passing away from his radiation treatment. Dwight and Sherry bury Finch and then break up with each other. Dwight mentions he plans to head back to Alexandria and start over, so this seems like a way to write Sherry out of future spin offs. Morgan intends to also head back to Alexandria, which brings me much happiness, with Mo, and leaves PADRE to Madison and the others. Morgan takes Grace and buries her at Eastman’s property, he tells Mo he is going to look for that man who helped him. He gets on his walkie and says he is going to look for Rick, if he is at Alexandria or not(interesting choice of words) and he will reach out over the walkie every day at dawn, just like Rick used to do. I instantly wonder if when Morgan returns he finds out that Rick is missing and sets out to look for him too.
This all is the setup of what I refer to as a soft reset. Now that Morgan is off the show it leaves Madison as the star character, and everyone knows how much I am not a fan. But with that said, I know plenty of people who were always upset that Morgan came over to the show so they can have a chance to see how the story ends with the originals. Madison’s plan for PADRE is not to follow these coordinates, but to find the files that have the information on the children and who their parents were and where they were taken from. The idea is they will get families back together and bring the parents to PADRE to grow it like it should have been from the beginning. She is heard on the radio giving coordinates and directions to give an SOS message on that channel, and PADRE will come to them. Someone is listening to this, and I’m thinking it is Troy Otto, who might be the new villain to end the series. For those who don’t remember, he was hit in the head twice by Madison with a hammer at the dam, and we assumed he was dead. But this hand grabs a map, that had points starting in the west in Mexico, and continually lined up heading East. We also see the hammer that was used on Otto, followed by the mechanical arm hand that Alicia had, you have to believe that is his trophy and his proof that he is on the correct trail to get to Madison. I won’t lie, it’s an interesting call back, I don’t love it, but I don’t hate it, yet.
