TWD: World Beyond Easter Egg Spotted in Fear the Walking Dead

Sunday’s episode of The Walking Dead: World Beyond ties the spinoff to Fear the Walking Dead, this time in the form of a tape belonging to journalist Althea (Maggie Grace). In “The Blaze of Gory,” the four World Beyond survivors — Hope (Alexa Mansour), Iris (Aliyah Royale), Elton (Nicolas Cantu), and Silas (Hal Cumpston) — find their journey out of Nebraska impeded by the Blaze of Gory, or the “B.O.G.,” described as an “everlasting fire of totally Old Testament proportions.” As explained by Elton, an unattended tire fire is capable of burning for years, even decades — luring “empties,” a.k.a. the undead, to it like moths to a flame.

In Fear Season 5 Episode 5, “The End of Everything,” Althea is especially protective over a tape labeled “The Bog #7.” In it, Al documents a clash between the Army and the National Guard at the onset of the zombie apocalypse. The tape ends with Al tearfully apologizing to her brother, Jesse, who died while she was away chasing the story.

“The Bog #7” could place Al in Omaha, Nebraska, on “The Night the Sky Fell” — a name used exclusively by the residents of the Campus Colony, referring to a zombie-filled plane crash on the streets of Omaha at the start of the apocalypse.

It’s not the first suspected connection between Fear and World Beyond. In “The End of Everything,” Al meets Isabelle (Sydney Lemmon) — one of the black-wearing soldiers of the Civic Republic Military, a group heavily involved in World Beyond — who could be the mentioned daughter of CRM Lieutenant Colonel Elizabeth Kublek (Julia Ormond).

Al’s collection of tapes already linked her to The Walking Dead when a Season 4 episode revealed she interviewed Abraham Ford (Michael Cudlitz) and Eugene Porter (Josh McDermitt) during her travels across the country.

The notorious B.O.G. is a concept imagined by World Beyond co-creators Matt Negrete and Scott Gimple, the latter an executive producer on Fear and chief creative officer for the entire Walking Dead Universe.

“We started to think, ‘What’s the coolset-piecee that we haven’t seen before?’ We started researching tire fires, and what we discovered was that, if unchecked, technically a tire fire can go for years, and even decades. There’s some that have been known to smolder, if left unattended to, for that long,” Negrete told Entertainment Weekly. “We just thought, ‘What if it’s just this massive industrial park or maybe a tire-recycling factory, something like that?’”

He continued, “With the idea that Nebraska is notoriously flat, you’d be able to see the smoke for miles, which would then attract empties. The longer we thought about it, the more we thought, ‘Yeah, that’s going to be something that is really cool and different. Something we haven’t seen before on any of the other shows.’”

Follow the author @CameronBonomolo on Twitter for all things TWD. New episodes of The Walking Dead: World Beyond premiere Sundays at 10/9c on AMC.