Fear the Walking Dead Sets Up Zombie Submarine Spinoff Dead in the Water

Fear the Walking Dead wades into a walker-filled nuclear submarine in “USS Pennsylvania,” revealing the setting of AMC’s digital spin-off series Dead in the Water. An original scripted series tying into Season 6 of Fear, the previously announced spin-off produced by showrunners Andrew Chambliss and Ian Goldberg and executive producer Scott Gimple “tells the story of a submarine crew fighting for survival, cut off from the surface world just as the apocalypse hits, becoming a nuclear-fueled walker-filled death trap with no way out.” Spoiler warning for Sunday’s Fear Season 6 Episode 15, “USS Pennsylvania.”

It’s aboard the USS Pennsylvania where Teddy (John Glover) plans to unlock utter destruction using the key stolen from Morgan Jones (Lennie James), who took the key off the body of bounty hunter Emile (Demetrius Grosse). The ax-wielding Emile stole the key from decapitated sailor Walter (Damon Carney) when collecting a bounty put out by the two men (Joseph Castillo-Midyett and Stephen Brodie) we saw spray-painting “the end is the beginning” on the beached submarine at the start of the season.

Walter is the first known survivor of the washed-up submarine. The other is weapons officer Riley (Nick Stahl), Teddy’s right-hand man who we learn “found himself without a family” and who “stopped something like this once” before (a possible mutiny?) He’s prepared to die by programming and then launching the 23 missiles each loaded with ten warheads, something Dwight (Austin Amelio) says is “enough to take out a continent, at least.”

When Dwight and Sherry (Christine Evangelista) move deeper into the submarine, they find a grisly sight: blood-stained bunks where two walkers, Wright and Farley, are handcuffed together in death. “I wonder what happened in here,” Dwight says about a story we’re likely to learn in Dead in the Water.

Morgan and Strand (Colman Domingo) make it past the silo room, but a quick-clicking Geiger counter alerts them of a female walker resembling a woman whose photos decorate Riley’s bunk. She’s oozing with evidence of exposure to the radioactive material inside a compartment with a dangerously high milliREM reading of 40,000, but it’s unclear if she’s part of the 150-person crew — now zombified — who died aboard the USS Pennsylvania.

Jacob Pinion (Fear Season 6 episode “Damage From the Inside,” six-episode digital mini-series The Althea Tapes) writes Dead in the Water. Scott Gimple, Fear executive producer and chief content officer of the Walking Dead Universe, is also aboard the project. The digital short series has not set a release date.

Fear the Walking Dead airs its Season 6 finale, “The Beginning,” on Sunday, June 13, at 9/8c on AMC. Follow the author @CameronBonomolo on Twitter for all things The Walking Dead Universe.