‘Fear The Walking Dead’ Guide For Season 4 Premiere

Whether you stopped watching Fear the Walking Dead in its early seasons or never gave the show a shot in the first place, the Season Four premiere is the perfect place to start.

The AMC zombie show will be borrowing a character from The Walking Dead, introducing a slew of new faces, and bringing its hardened gang back into the mix on Sunday night as an epic new season begins. Fear the Walking Dead will be set in Texas, uncharted territory in the Dead universe, meaning almost everything will feel brand new and require no prior knowledge to dive in.

Some of the characters, however, will be building on to narrative threads created in the first three seasons, which will be outlined in this quick guide to get everyone up to speed in time for Fear the Walking Dead Season Four.

The Clark Family

The show’s main protagonists, essentially the equivalent to the Grimes clan on The Walking Dead, are the Clark family: Madison, Nick, and Alicia. 

Prior to the apocalypse, Madison was a high school guidance counselor. She had a tough upbringing, one so harsh that she had to kill her own father to protect her mother — well before the world began to fall. When the audience met her, she was doing her best to make a blended family work. Since, each member of that family without the Clark last name has perished, but Madison has managed to keep her kids alive.

Nick spent his first days of the apocalypse in the hospital. The youngster was seriously addicted to drugs and happened to be super high when he encountered his first walker. Of course, no one would believe what he claimed to have seen, because he was always super high. Since those days, he has seemingly kicked the bad habit, adapted to the world faster than most of those around him, and even managed to find himself a girlfriend in Luciana.

Alicia has perhaps had the most tremendous and interesting arc of all of the Fear the Walking Dead characters. Her pre-apocalyptic days consisted of good grades in high school and spending time with her boyfriend. Early on, she made some ill-advised decisions which would cost members of the group, but has since learned the ways of the apocalypse, enjoys twirling a pocket knife, and has learned how to efficiently use guns. 

Victor Strand

Alongside the Clark family is Victor Strand, a cunning character who is mostly called by his last name.

Strand was first introduced in a holding area where Nick was locked away by the government in Season One. The character used his impressive ability to find the right words to make a friend and get them out. He lead the Clark family to a boat, the Abigail, and together they sailed to Mexico. 

It turned out, the well-dressed and sly Strand wasn’t necessarily what he appeared as. The boat belonged to his boyfriend (or con target) and he would always do whatever it took to keep himself alive. After being abandoned, he once made contact with an astronaut, who informed him the entire world had fallen.

In Season Three, Strand was a catalyst in the events which would leave the group scattered and the dam which offered a too-good-to-be-true water supply ultimately exploding. 

Daniel Salazar

Daniel Salazar has brought an intense Spanish spice to Fear the Walking Dead since its first season. Like Morgan on The Walking Dead, the character has come and gone through the show’s first seasons, and will continue to do so going forward.

Prior to the fall, Daniel owned a barber shop in Los Angeles. He had a wife named Griselda and daughter named Ofelia but both have been claimed by the apocalypse.

At the aforementioned-and-explained-in-a-moment dam, Daniel had found sanctuary with its leader Lola. After learning his daughter was alive, he wanted to strike a deal with enemy groups in order to reunite with her, though the reunion came just moments too late and he had to put her down.

In one of Fear the Walking Dead‘s best episodes, Daniel appeared to be invincible. His faith guided him to the dam, as lightning bolts struck down walkers which would have otherwise killed him and other wild occurences preserved his survival. 

Since Season Three’s finale, Daniel has not been revealed as a survivor of the dam’s collapse, but he is promised to return in Season Four, at least in part. 

The Dam

The dam mentioned on each of the previous slides was essentially the explosion which provided Fear the Walking Dead with a reboot of sorts heading into Season Four.

All of the show’s main characters were present for its fall. In the final moments of Season Three, the enemy factions had cornered the Clark family and their allies, prompting Nick to blow the dam in an attempted heroic suicide which could have rescued his family from the enemies but ultimately sent everybody down with it. The only character revealed to survive at the time was Madison.

Heading into Season Three, the protagonists have survived, reunited, and established themselves a safe space in a baseball stadium. Of course, the traumatic experience will be looming over the characters as they try to move forward. 

Morgan Jones

The newest piece of the puzzle is Morgan Jones. Morgan joins after being developed on The Walking Dead for several years.

The character is one which has lost everything — his wife, his son, and himself. Such scars will be present in the Fear the Walking Dead Season Four premiere as he battles with the life he attempts to leave behind in favor of a path of solitude.

The character’s journey began in Atlanta, taking him along a path to Virginia where he learned to fight and took on a philosophy of “all life is precious.” His mentality, however, is unstable as flashbacks to his son’s death or others people he cares about being lost can trigger the character to lash out. 

“When I first read it I thought it was a fantastic place for just the first episode and how it was paced, just the storytelling of it,” Morgan actor Lennie James told ComicBook.com. “Of the meeting of Morgan and John and then the meeting of Morgan and Althea and then that culminating in the first moment when they cross paths with the existing characters from Fear. I thought that how the writers had come up with the way to tell that story and introduce all of those elements was absolutely fantastic.”