‘Walking Dead’ Chief Hints at Rick Grimes Connection on ‘Fear’ Season 5

Walking Dead chief content officer Scott Gimple appeared to hint at ties to the missing Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) surfacing in Season Five of spinoff Fear the Walking Dead.

"In the first half of this season on Fear the Walking Dead, we tell a beautiful, and action-packed, and hilarious, and sad, and explosive kind of story that actually has to do a lot with one of the characters here, but very much a great deal having to do with another peek into the greater universe of The Walking Dead," the Fear and Walking Dead executive producer said at WonderCon, where he appeared alongside Fear stars Lennie James, Alycia Debnam-Carey, Colman Domingo, Jenna Elfman, Garret Dillahunt, Danay García, Maggie Grace, Rubén Blades, Alexa Nisenson, and Austin Amelio.

Gimple added that character finds themselves at the center of "some of the things that have been going on on this show and on The Walking Dead."

Both series again become intertwined with the arrival of Amelio's Dwight, a Walking Dead cast away who heads west sometime after his banishment from the Virginia settlements by Daryl Dixon (Norman Reedus), presumably in search of disappeared wife Sherry (Christine Evangelista).

Dwight's arrival marks the second crossover between the mothership series and the spinoff, linked for the first time last April when James' Morgan ran away from Alexandria, later emerging as new series lead following the death of Madison Clark (Kim Dickens).

The character singled out by Gimple is likely Morgan or Dwight, who reunite amid the survivors' stranger-seeking goodwill mission.

"So there's that," Gimple added. "And then as far as seeing other crossovers, there is some very, very... the thing with Dwight, the thing with Morgan is very unusual, but there's something really cool about the past of some of these characters that we're gonna see."

Lincoln's Rick Grimes previously appeared in the opening minutes of Fear the Walking Dead's Season Four opener when he was unable to prevent Morgan's leaving Alexandria. More than 19 months later, Rick appeared to die when halting an advancing walker horde but was instead secretly rescued by Anne (Pollyanna McIntosh) and flown away aboard a helicopter, igniting a six-year time jump in the flagship series.

Gimple, who scripts the Walking Dead movie, previously confirmed answers behind that far-reaching helicopter group — including revelations about the 'A' and 'B' system used to classify abducted humans first seen in The Walking Dead — will be explored in the movie headed to AMC in 2020.

The involvement of the helicopter group responsible for Rick's disappearance was again hinted at in Sunday's Talking Dead season finale, where Gimple said coming Fear episodes will "expand" one of the previously-seen "greater stories of the universe."

Fear the Walking Dead Season Five premieres Sunday, June 2 on AMC.

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