Warning: this story contains spoilers for Sunday’s Fear the Walking Dead Season 7 Episode 5, “Till Death.” Fear the Walking Dead is tagging in Aisha Tyler. The Archer and Criminal Minds star, who enters the ring as celebrity ex-pro wrestler Mickey in Season 7, puts the smackdown on the dead when tag-teaming a walker wrestling match with husband and wife Dwight (Austin Amelio) and Sherry (Christine Evangelista) in Sunday’s “Till Death.” Below, Fear‘s co-showrunner Ian Goldberg breaks down Tyler’s mysterious new character, Mickey’s ultimate finishing move, and this episode’s Walkermania.
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Dwight and Sherry are the Bonnie and Clyde of the nuclear-zombie apocalypse when they ride into “Till Death” as the Dark Horses, what Victor Strand (Colman Domingo) sees as “peace officers of a modern frontier.” Strand taps the ethical outlaws to return Mickey to The Tower in exchange for residency.
Mickey is fixated on finding her husband and finding Padre, the terminus where Alicia Clark (Alycia Debnam-Carey) and other survivors are headed to escape the fallout of the nuclear warheads that detonated to end Season 6. “I can’t sit idly by while Mickey puts herself in grave danger for a man who is dead or a place that doesn’t exist,” explains Strand, saying the Rangers he sends to retrieve the holed-up Mickey “come back bruised and tattered — if they come back at all.”
When the Dark Horses find Mickey, they learn the real reason Strand wants her back: so no one else can ever escape The Tower. Mickey fought her way through Strand’s zombie moat and a walker herd using a makeshift suit of armor she pieced together using duct tape, a football helmet, and thick phonebooks.
Because Sherry and Dwight found each other halfway across the country, she wants to help Mickey find her husband — and Padre. Dwight finally recognizes Mickey as “The Bride,” one-half of the husband and wife wrestling duo “Dearly Beloved.” The Grapple Chapel Wrestling Club, an old training gym in Texas City, is where Mickey might find her husband. Strand took Mickey in when the bombs went off, and she’s been trying to get back to the gym ever since.
Sherry slathers Mickey’s chewed-up suit in walker blood to help her get through the horde blocking the entrance to the Grapple Chapel, where Mickey finds her husband has reanimated. When walkers flood inside the gym, they tag team the horde (to the tune of Damian Marley reggae track “Welcome to Jamrock”).
The gimmick match ends with Dwight setting up Mickey and Cliff’s signature two-man maneuver — the high-flying finishing move “Till Death Do Us Part” — as Mickey leaps from the top rope, plunging her blade into the brain of the last walker standing.
705 is “a great showcase episode for Dwight and Sherry, but also for Aisha Tyler,” Fear co-showrunner Ian Goldberg said on Fear TWD Episode Insider. “[Director] Lennie [James] brought fun to it with the wrestling component. This sequence was probably the most number of fun conversations we had, but there were certain things that we knew we wanted to get in there.”
Goldberg and co-showrunner Andrew Chambliss knew Fear‘s first-ever Walkermania match would need “a walker’s head bashed into a turnbuckle, we need the steel chair, we need the piledriver.”
“We knew we wanted it to culminate with the ‘Till Death Do Us Part,’” added Goldberg. “Dwight gets to work in tandem with Mickey to perform ‘Till Death Do Us Part,’ the ultimate finishing move of Dearly Beloved, which is just this beautiful moment of Dwight getting to kind of live a childhood fantasy.”
Here’s what Fear fans are saying about the episode, now streaming on AMC+:
