Fear The Walking Dead is moving on from Madison Clark.
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The Walking Dead spinoff killed off its lead in Sunday’s season 4 mid-season finale, and comments made by actress Kim Dickens in her exit interview with Entertainment Weekly quells hopes Madison will reappear in the back half of season 4.
“Yeah, I think it is a bold move and they had the courage to do that and the vision to do that, but it certainly sends it into a spin. I don’t know what the second half of the season entails,” Dickens said.
“I haven’t seen any of the scripts even. I’m still super-close to my castmates and everything. We’re all really tight, but I haven’t really heard anything about what’s going to happen on the show. It’ll be interesting to see. And it will be a void.”
With the Clark clan now whittled down to one — only Madison’s daughter, Alicia (Alycia Debnam-Carey), remains of the original Clark-Manawa grouping — Dickens said the loss of Madison will have a major impact on the show and its surviving characters.
“When the show was created by Robert Kirkman and Dave Erickson, it was like seeing this apocalypse through the eyes of this family and keeping this family together. I found that so compelling, and something that really resonated,” Dickens said.
“I mean, this is a woman who was not just surviving, and interested in surviving one day at a time — she was interested in saving her children and starting over and creating a new world. That was really interesting to me. So it was going to spin into a different direction, and I think there will be a void for a while, but that void is going to inform the lives of the other characters.”
Dickens’ onscreen son, Nick (Frank Dillane), was killed three episodes into an overhauled season 4, but the character continued to appear throughout the front half of the season by way of flashback as the narrative was split into the ‘then’ timeline — finding the Clarks during happier times at their newly-erected baseball stadium home — and the ‘now’ timeline, which explored the dour events following the collapse of the stadium and Madison’s death.
The official Twitter account for The Walking Dead further confirmed the back half of season 4 would no longer flip between the two timelines, ruling out future flashback appearances for Madison.
After three-and-a-half seasons as the lead of Fear, Dickens admitted she was “shocked and disappointed and heartbroken” to learn the shows producers and showrunners Andrew Chambliss and Ian Goldberg had decided to kill Madison before going into season 4.
Fear The Walking Dead returns with its mid-season premiere Sunday, August 12 on AMC.
