The Rick Grimes Conspiracy Deepens in Fear the Walking Dead 505 Opening Minutes

AMC has released the opening minutes of Sunday’s Fear the Walking Dead 505, “The End of Everything,” which sees the missing Althea (Maggie Grace) attempt to flee her armor-clad captor.

Al earlier uncovered a major story when she came across a slain and subsequently reanimated soldier — one sporting the same black armor as her assailant — using her video camera to document the maps and odd markings found on his person, all labeled “CRM” and bearing the same three-ring logo later seen on a familiar helicopter in the area.

Just seconds after making radio contact with Morgan (Lennie James) and telling him “there’s a story here,” Al was tazed and captured, leaving Morgan’s group of survivors puzzled by her disappearance. When Al comes to, she makes a run for it when the masked soldier takes the time to immolate their fallen comrade.

Escaping into the woods and helplessly surrounded by walkers, Al wins a last-minute save from the soldier, who is unmasked with a boot to the face. The soldier (Sydney Lemmon) wants Al’s tape, but it’s hidden. And if Al wants to stay alive, she’ll use it as leverage.

A preview for the episode sees Al later dig into her bag and retrieve a tape labeled “The Bog #7” — one possibly tied to the conspiracy the black-clad soldier is trying to keep under wraps.

It’s this same group that will be responsible for Rick Grimes‘ (Andrew Lincoln) disappearance from Virginia roughly seven months in the future, some time after Rick’s ally Heath (Corey Hawkins) vanished when snatched by this same group.

The CRM group was first introduced through ties to Anne (Pollyanna McIntosh), then acting as junkyard-dwelling Scavenger leader Jadis.

This community implemented a human classification system — targets were designated as an “A” or a “B” — that sometimes saw “Jadis” trade victims to the CRM group in exchange for supplies. Rick and Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) were marked as “A’s,” and Anne’s lover Gabriel (Seth Gilliam) was originally a “B” before she determined him to be an “A” after he refused to run away with her.

In his final episode, when Anne pleaded for a hovering helicopter to rescue a severely wounded Rick, the Alexandria leader was similarly named a “B.”

“It works as a useful tool to define two groups of people, that’s about all I can say,” McIntosh previously told ComicBook.com.

The Walking Dead showrunner Angela Kang was similarly tight-lipped when asked to explain the system conceived by chief content officer Scott Gimple, who pens the Walking Dead spinoff movie that will reveal Rick’s whereabouts.

“So, here’s what I’ll say about an A and a B. She originally thought Gabriel was a B,” Kang told EW.

“The A and B has something to do with the thing that she was involved in which was human trading, and it was a way to differentiate between classes of people. She thought that Gabriel was a B. She knew that Rick and Negan were A’s but she now thinks that Gabriel is also an A. So I’ll just say that, because I think anything more, I might get in trouble.”

Fear the Walking Dead 505, “The End of Everything,” premieres Sunday, June 30 at 9/8c on AMC.