Fear the Walking Dead’s season 3 tagline says it all

Nick Clark - Fear The Walking Dead season 3 key art, AMC
Nick Clark - Fear The Walking Dead season 3 key art, AMC /
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The third season Fear the Walking Dead posters feature the tagline “Fear what you become.” How true that is in the zombie apocalypse.

The Walking Dead and its companion show Fear the Walking Dead are great entertainment, but if you dive deeper it’s clear that there are some truths about human nature in them. Those truths can be beautiful, and they can also be horrific. In the third season of Fear the Walking Dead, the tagline is “Fear what you become,” and there is a lot of truth in that.

There’s an old saying during disasters that goes “women and children first” and it is usually applied in cases of sinking ships and general evacuations from bad situations. For the most part, people hold that as a gold standard, but what happens when your family is in danger? Do you stop and rescue someone else before saving your own family? These are things that we’re exploring in the newly minted zombie apocalypse seen in Fear the Walking Dead.

Though it’s still early, (we’re in season 3 but not much time has passed since the world fell apart) society has already broken down and factions have developed. There are the haves and the have-nots, and the have-nots usually want what the haves have and are desperate enough to fight (and kill) for it. All of those pretty little lines we talk about in Social Contract theory go out the window and it becomes take what you need to survive, even if that means taking another person’s life.

We’re seeing more of that in The Walking Dead than Fear the Walking Dead, but it’s important to note this with Fear the Walking Dead because characters like Travis and Madison are being forced to let go of the people they once were in order to survive. Travis has gone from being the mediator, the level-headed one in the middle of chaos, to a killer. It doesn’t matter if the murder was justified. He was judge, jury and executioner inside of a few minutes once he learned his son’s fate.

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Season 3 of Fear the Walking Dead will no doubt see many of the characters coming to grips with their new lives, and sometimes a revelation like that can be terrifying.

Fear the Walking Dead returns June 4 on AMC.