The CRM Is Flying Back to Fear the Walking Dead

The Fear the Walking Dead showrunners hint Althea (Maggie Grace) has not seen the last of Isabelle (Sydney Lemmon), the black-suited soldier for the CRM linking all three Walking Dead shows. The Civic Republic Military flew into Fear‘s Season 5 with a helicopter carrying Isabelle, who warns Althea that the CRM is “a force who are not living for ourselves or for now” but for the future. It’s the same future that Teddy (John Glover) — the leader of the below-ground group behind “the end is the beginning” — is out to destroy by targeting CRM drop sites and going after the nuclear submarine key held by Morgan Jones (Lennie James).

When Althea and Wes (Colby Hollman) dig into the underground community in “The Holding,” they find maps watermarked with the CRM’s three-ring logo. In “Alaska,” Althea and Dwight (Austin Amelio) tried to rendezvous with Isabelle — nicknamed “Beer Lady” — on the roof of an office building/CRM drop site they found crawling with plague-carrying rats and graffitied with a spray-painted message: “The end is the beginning.”

“The Holding” ends with Althea setting off to find and warn Isabelle about Teddy’s people targeting the CRM drop sites — as she tells Dwight, “If they hit a chopper, they could take out a lot of people.”

“It definitely is something that caught Al’s attention and kind of recontextualized the episode where she was in the tower and she thought the rats that had the plague were just there by happenstance, or that Teddy was targeting the people who lived in the tower. But now she’s realizing that he actually had larger plans and he was targeting these people in the helicopter,” co-showrunner Andrew Chambliss told EW. “Now he might not know who the CRM is, but when you see people in helicopters, you know that you can probably exact some destruction on them.”

“And I think on a more personal level, what it does for Al is it makes her realize that she’s got to act, she can’t kind of wait and see what happens. She can’t sit by and accept that something could happen to Isabelle,” Chambliss added. “So that’s why at the end of the episode she kind of makes that decision to go off and warn her, even though she knows trying to make contact with someone from the CRM could result in her own death. So it really speaks to kind of the way her feelings for Isabelle are sticking with her, even after all this time.”

Asked to reveal when audiences will see Al’s search, co-showrunner Ian Goldberg said, “It won’t be too long. We won’t say exactly, but we will check back in on it and we’re excited for the next chapter there.”

Follow the author @CameronBonomolo on Twitter for all things TWD. New episodes of Fear the Walking Dead Season 6 premiere Sundays at 9/8c on AMC.