Fear TWD Revisits The Walking Dead’s First Episode

[Warning: This story contains spoilers for Fear the Walking Dead’s “King County” episode.] “You tried to get me to do it because I was supposed to do it,” Morgan Jones (Lennie James) told Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) on The Walking Dead‘s “Clear” episode. Morgan was “supposed” to put down his undead wife Jenny (Keisha Tillis), who was roaming the King County, Georgia, neighborhood where Morgan met Rick in the “Days Gone Bye” pilot episode of The Walking Dead. But Morgan couldn’t shoot his walker wife with the gun Rick gave him — not until after the zombified Jenny bit and turned Morgan’s son, Duane Jones (Adrian Kali Turner). 

After Duane died, a manic Morgan saw red as a crazed killer compelled to “clear” the dead and the living. He warned Rick that his people would be “torn apart by teeth or bullets.” And while Morgan would go on to walk the path of the peaceful warrior after a man named Eastman (John Carroll Lynch) helped clear his mind with the art of Aikido, he ran so far away from people that he crossed over to Fear the Walking Dead.

On Sunday’s “King County” episode, Morgan returned to the neighborhood not seen since The Walking Dead‘s very first episode to do what he was supposed to do 12 years earlier: put down Duane. Morgan couldn’t bring himself to kill his son… so he left the reanimated Duane chained up inside a house (like his comic book counterpart).

“I ran like I didn’t know what else to do. Ran and left him here. Left my boy to become one of them,” Morgan explained to his daughter Mo (Zoey Merchant) and her mother Grace (Karen David), who followed Morgan after escaping the island PADRE. Some 4,300 days gone “bye” later, Morgan made it clear that he would put his boy to rest before he could help Madison Clark (Kim Dickens) and Daniel Salazar (Rubén Blades) retake the island and reunite every parent and child separated by PADRE.

After a walker swarm trapped them inside the Drake house where he lived with Duane all those years ago, Morgan eventually realized his unresolved guilt over Jenny and Duane endangered Grace and Mo. “You are so scared of the past repeating itself that you don’t even realize that you’re the one who’s making it happen,” Grace told Morgan, who finally used Rick’s rifle to shoot the zombified Duane before he could bite Mo.

13 years after The Walking Dead aired “Days Gone Bye,” Morgan buried Duane next to Jenny in King County.

“Morgan has had an incredibly complicated journey from where he started on The Walking Dead to where we have found him on Fear. He’s petrified that he’s not going to be able to protect Mo, his daughter, the way he wasn’t able to protect his son. He’s still punishing himself for what happened with Duane way back when we first met him on The Walking Dead,” showrunner Andrew Chambliss explained on AMC+’s Fear TWD: Episode Insider. “The scene where Morgan buries Jenny and Duane was one that we talked about a lot. And I think what was really important to us was feeling like Morgan had done what he came there to do, was he put these ghosts of his past to rest and he was ready to move on.” 

It was a full-circle moment for Morgan — and the Walking Dead Universe. 

“I think the thing that made it so easy to return to King County and to return to that house that we saw in the pilot of The Walking Dead, this location, these sets where the entire Walking Dead universe began, was the fact that Morgan — at his core as a character — was defined by what happened in that house, by what didn’t happen in that house,” Chambliss said. “Those sets that were used in The Walking Dead pilot had long been dismantled, so we were very lucky that we got such an amazing production team that we could actually build the exterior of that yellow house. And then we re-created the interior using all the plans and all the set photographs that we had. It looks exactly like the house that Morgan Jones and Rick Grimes were in at the very start of this whole entire universe.”

New episodes of Fear the Walking Dead premiere Thursdays on AMC+ and Sundays on AMC. Stay tuned to ComicBook/TWD and follow @CameronBonomolo and @NewsOfTheDead on Twitter for more TWD Universe coverage.