Did Fear The Walking Dead Just Introduce A Mutant Super Zombie?

Spoilers for Fear the Walking Dead‘s Season 3 premiere follow.

Fear the Walking Dead decided not to hold anything back with its two hour Season 3 premiere on Sunday night.

The series kicked off its latest batch of episodes by bringing its core characters to a military base where Troy Otto was taking charge, conducting twisted experiments on people who had survived to this point. While most of this appeared to be in an effort to understand how long it took for people to turn after death, there was one potential experiment which stood out.

Just as one of the soldiers was leaving the compound, he heard a thumping on a wall. After taking a closer look through an air vent, a pile of rats poured out onto the soldier. Once they cleared out, he peeped through the air vent once more in truly cliche horror movie fashion only to find an incredibly strong walker was waiting for him on the other side.

The walker pulled the soldier through the wall, shattering his spine and ripping his head off. It was unlike anything that has ever been seen before in the world of the Dead.

This zombie was something different. It was strong enough to fold a man in half. It must be either the product of one of Troy’s experiments or a human who had been extremely muscular prior to the apocalypse and had recently turned. Given the bunch of rats which were crowded inside the wall, it’s possible the walker had preserved its strength by having a constant food supply.

Official Ruling

Speaking to Fear the Walking Dead‘s latest villainous actor, Dan Sharman, who plays Troy Otto on the series, ComicBook.com aimed to get to the bottom of this “super zombie” theory. 

“It’s not, but I like where your heads at,” Sharman said. “I’ve always been quite fascinated by the idea that at some point they change, and I think Troy is fascinated by every little minutiae of what causes this and wants to know why and wants to know how. So there’s a point in it where he, later in the season, where he has documented and taken this down. He hasn’t been able to create anything yet, but you never know. You never know.”

With Troy hanging around with his injured eye, Governor style, Sharman’s tease of “yet” is an intriguing word choice for a character experimenting on the dead.

New Walker Perspectives

Whether or not an explanation comes along within the show, this walker should change the way fans see the reanimated in the world of The Walking Dead. While walkers on the older sibling series have deteriorated into weak and easy-to-kill targets, Fear is proving that freshly turned walkers should be considered as major threats. 

Of course, the possibility remains that this walker was, in some form, a product of one of Troy’s experiments. The closest thing fans of the Dead universe have seen to scientific explanations for the walkers came in The Walking Dead‘s first season when Dr. Edwin Jenner explained how the brain works and doesn’t work when people become zombies. 

Fans will likely be a as hungry for answers as this creature was for flesh but, given the groups’ fleeing of this military base, the possibility of seeing this particular walker again seems minimal. 

More Walking Dead

A wholly original companion series to The Walking Dead, the #1 show on television among adults 18-49 for the last five years, “Fear the Walking Dead” explores the onset of the undead apocalypse through the eyes of a fractured family. The series is executive produced by Robert Kirkman, Gale Anne Hurd, Greg Nicotero, David Alpert and showrunner Dave Erickson and produced by AMC Studios.

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Fear the Walking Dead airs Sundays at 9 pm ET on AMC. For complete coverage and insider info all season long, follow @BrandonDavisBD on Twitter.