Did Fear The Walking Dead Create A Plot Hole To Avoid Controversy?

Spoilers for Fear the Walking Dead‘s third season follow. Eight episodes have aired on AMC with the series taking a midseason hiatus.

Fear the Walking Dead may have jumped around on a certain character’s age to avoid a controversial conversation. Some fans are catching on to a certain jump in Alicia Clark’s timeline during the show’s third season.

When Fear the Walking Dead began, Alicia Clark was a junior in high school, remarking to her boyfriend at the time that she was excited to graduate and be finished with it all at the end of the next year. The typical age of a high school junior is 16-years to 17-years-old. Most all high school students don’t become 18-years-old until their senior years.

In Season 3 of Fear the Walking Dead, Alicia Clark developed a relationship with Jake Otto, a character old enough to have finished law school and gained thorough experience in court. This means he studied in college for at least six years, aging him to at least 24-years-old.

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In the latest episodes of Fear the Walking Dead, Alicia pointed out that she was suddenly 18-years-old. While her age was not explicitly stated earlier in the series, her year in high school was the indicator. There is a possible argument for the character to have been held back but she is often described as the “over achiever” in the family, playing the opposite role of her former drug addict brother Nick and closely following the rules and making impressive grades in school. Given how smart Alicia Clark has been credited to be, there is little reason for her to have been held back, unless such a move was made and ultimately gave her an advantage by comparison to her class room peers.

Twitter user Maribel is one of many jumping onto this conspiracy theories bandwagon, claiming Fear the Walking Dead changed Alicia’s age in order to serve the story and provide the relationship with at-least-24-years-old Jake Otto, dodging the topic of the character sexually engaging a minor.

While it is possible such an event occurred, there is no evidence to support the claim the Fear the Walking Dead and its creative team altered Alicia’s age from the start for such a relationship. With at least a few weeks, possibly a couple of months, having passed since the world fell around the Clark family, the possibility of Alicia having a birthday between the start of Fear and the midseason 3 finale remains, as well, though it seems unlikely.

A more credible theory would be Alicia having been held back, lending her intellect an opportunity to mature and help be perceived as the over-achieving high school student audiences met in Fear the Walking Dead‘s first season. Being 17-years-old at the start of Season 1 provides the opportunity for Alicia to be 18-years-old in the show’s current timeline.

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Fear the Walking Dead airs Sundays at 9 pm ET on AMC. The Walking Dead will return for its eighth season in October with a trailer coming in July at San Diego Comic Con. For complete coverage and insider info all season long, follow @BrandonDavisBD on Twitter.