Fear the Walking Dead Showrunners Tease Game-Changing Moment Ends Season 5 Finale

Fear the Walking Dead showrunners Andrew Chambliss and Ian Goldberg say Sunday’s surprising and “game-changing” Season 5 finale, “End of the Line,” will reinvent the spinoff ahead of its sixth season.

“Well, I believe it was at Comic-Con where we kind of hinted at the fact that we were hurdling toward a bit of a game-changing moment at the end of Season 5. And this is the episode where that’s going to happen,” Goldberg told EW. “And the audience is going to start to piece that together as they watch the episode. But by the end of it, you’ll really see what we meant when we alluded to it being a game changer because this finale is going to be very emotional.”

“There’s going to be a lot of surprises,” Goldberg teased, “and it’s also going to set up where we’re headed in Season 6 in a lot of ways and you’ll see sort of the scaffolding for how those stories might play out.”

The way the group is left, Goldberg added, will “start to set up what Season 6 is going to look like and you’ll see that it’s very different than how Season 5 played out.”

Chambliss added this big development is one that “really is reinventing the show.”

“We’re always looking for ways from season to season or every half season to change up the narrative,” he said. “And what we’re doing here is really trying to fundamentally change these characters and allow us to explore new sides of them we haven’t seen before. There is a big change coming.”

The writer-producers first teased this game-changer at San Diego’s annual convention in July, promising it would “shake the entire group to the very core and really change the show in a way that will launch us into Season 6, in a really big way.”

This new direction planned for Season 6, first confirmed by network AMC during Comic-Con weekend, is one that the showrunners have been planning “for a while,” Goldberg said. And should viewers go back and rewatch Seasons 4 and 5, this payoff “might seem inevitable.”

In the Season 5 finale, Morgan (Lennie James), Dwight (Austin Amelio) and their convoy reach wild west town Humbug’s Gulch and find it hopelessly overrun with walkers. As Grace (Karen David) contends with her worsening illness, the survivors’ already dire situation takes another bad turn when they again encounter Virginia (Colby Minifie) and the Pioneers, who earlier kept Luciana (Danay García) behind to make fuel required to enact their ambitious plans for the future.

The Fear the Walking Dead Season 5 finale premieres tonight at 9/8c on AMC. For more TWD intel, follow the author @CameronBonomolo on Twitter.