Fear the Walking Dead co-showrunner Ian Goldberg isn’t ruling out a Madison Clark comeback in Season 7. The character played by Kim Dickens seemingly met her end midway through Season 4 of Fear, but no one’s gone until they’re gone: the lack of an on-screen corpse stokes theories that Madison might have survived a stadium fire in “No One’s Gone.” Season 6 brought back characters believed dead since that same episode when stadium survivors Cole (Sebastian Sozzi), Doug (Kenneth Wayne Bradley), and Viv (Rhoda Griffis) all returned, reuniting with Alicia Clark (Alycia Debnam-Carey) in “Mother.”
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“Madison has never not been a presence on this show, even after her exit in the middle of Season 4 after her sacrifice for her family,” Goldberg said when asked about Madison’s return during a post-Season 6 live stream with TWDUniverse on Twitch. “Her legacy has continued to live on, and we saw that this season through Alicia, and that will certainly continue as well.”
“What we have planned beyond that, we’ll see,” Goldberg added. “That’s pretty much as much as I can really say about it.”
Midway through Season 6, co-showrunner Andrew Chambliss told Insider that bringing back Madison in flashback or present-day Fear is “definitely something we talk about.” When Insider asked Goldberg to confirm whether Madison is dead, Goldberg said: “Well… we never saw her body. And Madison herself said, ‘No one’s gone until they’re gone.’”
Scott Gimple, an executive producer of Fear and the chief content officer of the Walking Dead Universe, also told fans of Dickens’ Madison to “keep hope alive” in an interview with ComicBook.com in November.
“It really is true that we’re kicking a lot of things around … We’ve had discussions of Fear. We’ve had discussions with [anthology spin-off series] Tales of the Walking Dead, and then even within the Walking Dead universe. There’s all sorts of possibilities,” Gimple told us. “We investigate that past a lot in stories, especially with Tales of the Walking Dead. So if it were all to come together, it would be amazing, but there’s some things floating around that are truly awesome.”
Dickens previously cast doubt on her character’s death, saying in a March 2020 interview with Access that Madison would have “scurried up that wall like nobody’s business” to save her children Alicia and Nick (Frank Dillane).
“I think fans are still upset about it at times. I don’t know,” Dickens said about Madison’s apparent death on Fear. “That’s the nature of the genre, though. You can be gone like that. And you can also pop up at some time, at any time.”
Season 7 of Fear the Walking Dead premieres later this year on AMC. Follow the author @CameronBonomolo on Twitter for all things The Walking Dead.
