Fear the Walking Dead Showrunner Explains “Spartan” PADRE

[Warning: This story contains spoilers for Fear the Walking Dead’s “Remember What They Took From You” episode.] This! Is! PADRE! Sunday’s Fear the Walking Dead season premiere revealed life inside the walls of the island settlement, which has spent the past seven years stealing children from their parents with Collectors like Lark/Madison Clark (Kim Dickens) and Nightingale/Morgan Jones (Lennie James). But PADRE isn’t just separating kids from their parents: he’s separating the “fledglings” from their emotions, training children like eight-year-old Wren/Mo (Zoey Merchant) to fight “carrion” (walkers) for mysterious reasons.

“PADRE is all about putting the settlement first, putting community first,” co-showrunner Andrew Chambliss said on AMC+’s Fear TWD: Episode Insider. “In many ways, we thought of this as kind of like a modern-day version of Sparta, where the children were taken and were raised in barracks and were taught how to fight, were taught how to put the city state first. That’s kind of what PADRE is all about.”

PADRE — both a place and a person — indoctrinates the kidnapped students, teaching them a pledge: Who are we learning this for? PADRE! Who sustains our way of life? PADRE! Who is teaching us to be strong? PADRE! Who is rebuilding the world? PADRE!

After a seven-year time jump, Madison spends the episode trying to reunite Mo with her parents, Morgan and Grace (Karen David) – only to learn that they’re working for PADRE as Nightingale and Heron. Like Morgan, Madison was once a Collector for PADRE, but defected when she found out he lied about the whereabouts of her kids Nick and Alicia.

The community that has been teased since season 7 is supposedly building “something better” 12 years post-apocalypse. When Morgan asks why PADRE doesn’t bring parents to the island, he explains: “We tried. We found they don’t want to build something better. They want to re-build what we had — and what we had got us into this mess.” The episode ends with Morgan and Grace reuniting with their daughter — only to send Mo back to PADRE’s island.

“For Mo it’s this glimmer of what she’s been missing. ‘Maybe PADRE is wrong. Maybe I’m meant to be out here. Maybe I’m meant to be with these two people. And maybe we’re going to get to kind of ride off into the sunset and finally be a family.’ It’s really setting Mo up for a fall when she realizes that both Morgan and Grace, they’ve called PADRE, and they’re handing her over,” Chambliss explained. “We realize that they do still love her, that they do still want what’s best for her, but they just think that’s her living on the island. That’s her being raised by PADRE.”

He continued: “It’s all about showing how far they’ve fallen and really creating some real mystery about what it is that makes them think that they can’t give Mo what she needs. And that’s kind of the question that we spend in the next five episodes unpacking.”

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.