Last week, a Twitter prompt went viral with 28,000 retweets and 233,000 likes when a user asked, “When did you quit The Walking Dead?” While there are still millions of us who do watch, the answer to that question was mostly unanimous. It was after Negan lined up several characters from The Walking Dead and beat Glenn and Abraham to death with his baseball bat. It’s no secret that ratings for The Walking Dead reached their peak ahead of that Season 7 moment and have been in decline ever since, even as Negan himself has more or less redeemed himself on the series.
Although the scene is an iconic one for the series, it is also a reminder of a hugely unpopular moment. It’s curious then that Fear the Walking Dead would so clearly evoke that same moment in the series’ latest teaser.
Fear the Walking Dead itself has been on a major creative upswing this season, and this scene is coming in Fear’s run around the same time it arrived in the run of the parent series. Hopefully, however, the “Negan line-up” presented in the teaser will be subverted in some way because if any of the four are killed off here in a grisly fashion, there may be more fan backlash.
The teaser does, at least, portend an interesting and complicated back half of Season six, one in which Victor Strand still seems to be working for Virginia and the Rangers. He’s burned all his bridges with his allies, and from the looks of this teaser, it may have been Victor who orchestrated this “Negan line-up.” It would be fun to see someone break bad, although it’s still the fervent hope of most Fear fans that it will ultimately be Madison who does so. Fans might get their wish. Strand, meanwhile, has always been a little sketchy, but invariably he always comes out on the side of good. I wouldn’t ultimately expect any different this time around.
Fear the Walking Dead returns on April 11th with the back half of Season six.