Fear the Walking Dead season 5: When and where are we?

With all of the traveling around in season 4, we asked Fear the Walking Dead showrunner Andrew Chambliss where – and when – season 5 picks up.

Fear the Walking Dead has done some traveling since the series premiere when the Clark-Manawa clan was in Los Angeles. There’s also the matter of how much time has passed between the season 4 finale and the season 5 premiere. Thankfully, showrunner Andrew Chambliss was kind enough to provide some clarity on these pressing issues.

So far the Fear the Walking Dead survivors have covered quite a bit of ground over four seasons. From the Pacific Ocean to Mexico, and from the remnants of the US-Mexico border and across the Southwest to Texas, the show has moved around quite a bit. However it’s not clear where they ended up at the end of season 4 given that Morgan kept toeing the Mississippi border.

I had a chance to talk with Andrew Chambliss at WonderCon 2019 in March about the passage of time between the seasons and I also wanted to see if he could provide some clarity about where the group is at the start of season 5:

"We are definitely going to see our characters in a new place, a strange land with some mysterious things going on. And we’re going to find them a few months after we left them at the end of last season. It’s enough time to see how their mission has gone and what it has done to them."

The passage of a few months after the season 4 finale still places the group squarely in the roughly 19-month period between the finale of The Walking Dead’s All Out War (when Morgan and Dwight left) and Rick’s disappearance. It also means that Fear the Walking Dead is over six years behind the current TWD timeline based on where the show left off at the end of season 9.

In terms of location, Chambliss definitely danced around the topic, and probably for good reason. It’s a valid question because we know that the show spent a majority of time in season 4 in Texas, aside from Morgan, Sarah and Wendell’s forays into Mississippi. It wasn’t immediately clear where everyone ended up at the end of season 4, but now that an airplane is in play it explains why Chambliss remained mum on the issue.

As far as the first four episodes of season 5 go, the flashbacks are over and the season 5 story is firmly rooted in the show’s present timeline, which, of course, is in the larger TWD Universe’s past. (It’s a bit “wibbly wobbly, timey wimey” at present with two shows in different timelines. And points if you get the reference!)

So far we have a ballpark idea of when Fear the Walking Dead takes places but not a lot to go on in terms of where. From the look of the trailer the group has found themselves in rather unfriendly territory. Now it’s a matter of waiting to see what happens when the show returns on June 2.