'Fear The Walking Dead's New Villains Explained

Fear The Walking Dead 4x02 introduced the newest group of bad guys to the Walking Dead world, but this threat offers something deeper, showrunners Andrew Chambliss and Ian Goldberg tell EW.

"What we find interesting about the Vultures is that unlike a lot of the other adversaries that we've seen characters come up against on Fear the Walking Dead, or even The Walking Dead, their threat is not one of violence," Goldberg said.

"It's more of kind of an existential, philosophical threat, which is they move around from place to place… We see the Vultures as sort of like doctors delivering bad news."

The moochers-slash-looters set up a sort of tailgate party outside the walls of the baseball stadium called home by the Clark clan and their allies, with slick leader Mel (series newcomer Kevin Zegers) telling Madison they intend to sit back and watch as the stadium runs its natural course.

"When they show up and Mel, Kevin Zegers' character, talks to Madison outside the stadium, the way he looks at it he's trying to warn her," Goldberg explains.

"He's seen this situation play out many times before. It always goes the same way. There's sort of a cynicism and an inevitability to the way that they see things, so they don't need to attack. They can sit. They can wait because they know what the ultimate outcome is."

Adds Chambliss: "They kind of see themselves as the good guys who are just trying to do the right thing and just trying to explain that this is the way the world works now. I think that's the thing that will make what Madison and her family have to do so difficult because it really is almost like they're fighting a force of nature."

"You're not taking anything from us," Madison told Mel in their parking lot standoff.

"People always say that. See, we're not taking anything from anyone. Anyone who's alive, anyway," Mel explained. "You see… I've had this conversation a hundred times."

Telling Madison that they know her crew of nearly 50 are "good people," Mel succinctly laid out the roaming groups' philosophy:

"There is a natural cycle to a place like this, okay, and yours is about to run out. So there's two ways this can go," he said.

"Either you give us your stuff and live — hell, you can join us, you can become one of us. Or we wait for you all to die, trying to make things work. But either way, I end up with that gun on your hip and whatever else I want. That's not a threat. That's just the way it goes."

Mel's words just might prove prophetic: in the present, Madison's crew — Alicia, Nick, Luci, and Strand — are dirtied and desperate, left without a home, and Madison could be dead.

Fear The Walking Dead airs Sundays at 9/8c on AMC.