Fear the Walking Dead Making-of Special Goes Behind the Scenes of Season 7

By Cameron Bonomolo

A new episode of AMC's Show Me More goes behind the scenes of Fear the Walking Dead Season 7. After revealing a special look at the making of the first part of The Walking Dead Season 11, AMC Networks and TWD Universe on Twitch host Clarke Wolfe are showing you more of Fear's explosive seventh season. The season, which sees Alicia Clark (Alycia Debnam-Carey) and Morgan Jones (Lennie James) going to war with Victor Strand (Colman Domingo) when Fear returns with new episodes April 17 on AMC, is set in the radioactive fallout of the nuclear-zombie apocalypse.

"We knew with the way that we ended Season 6 that everything about the show was gonna change dramatically," says showrunner Ian Goldberg of ushering in a punishing new era of the zombie apocalypse. Adds director and executive producer Michael E. Satrazemis, "I had to keep checking in with [showrunners] Andrew Chambliss and Ian Goldberg to make sure [the warhead] was really gonna detonate because it seemed like one of the craziest things you could possibly do on a television show, just knowing that it was going to continue and you're going to have to set up an aftermath."

It was murderer mortician and cult leader Teddy (John Glover) who dropped a bomb on Fear's sixth season, ending with Morgan and Strand failing to stop the madman from launching ten nuclear warheads to turn Texas into ground zero of the Apocalypse 2.0. 

"We wanted to kind of set everyone back to level zero in terms of what they knew about surviving in the apocalypse," says Chambliss. "We knew in order to pull that off we really were going to need to create a world that felt like it was new, that felt like it was alien. It felt like it was something we hadn't seen on any of the Walking Dead shows." 

The creatives looked to the real-world fallout of Hiroshima and Nagasaki for their bomb-blasted corner of The Walking Dead Universe. As predicted by former power plant worker Grace (Karen David), now hunkered down inside a beached submarine with part of Morgan's splintered group of survivors, the aftermath of the warheads would mean upping the stakes with environmental hazards even more dangerous than flesh-hungry walkers. 

"Seeing the devastation of structures but also the haze that lingers in the air from the fallout, there's fires that are still burning from the detonations," Goldberg notes. "Things that we see through Will's [Gus Halper] perspective in the beginning of Episode 701, just to sell this devastation."

The season premiere, "The Beacon," reveals this post-post-apocalyptic new world of hazmat-suited survivors and green or orange-hued surroundings that draw inspiration from Mad Max and the alien landscapes of Star Wars: The Mandalorian. 

In the half-hour special free to watch on YouTube, see how filmmakers created the nuclear zombie-apocalypse before it continues in Fear the Walking Dead Season 7B. The second part of the season premieres Sunday, April 17, on AMC.

 Follow the author @CameronBonomolo on Twitter and ComicBook's @NewsOfTheDead for TWD Universe coverage all season long.  

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