6 new questions about Fear The Walking Dead season six
By Liam O'Leary
5) Why is John fighting Strand?
Just after we see Charlie grabbed by walkers, the trailer cuts to John and Strand having a fistfight over John’s gun, with John, apparently, winning. What on Earth is going on here?!
Through both this trailer and the previous one, we catch glimpses of both John and Strand’s time under the Pioneers, and those glimpses seem to paint a picture of two men whose lives are going in opposite directions.
On the one hand, we have Strand, whose very first appearance in the trailer is him standing next to Alicia inside one of the Pioneers’ communities, both in handcuffs. Next, we see him dressed in what looks a lot like the ugly jumpsuit Daryl was in while a prisoner of the Saviors (Back in season seven of The Walking Dead), trying to help a man dressed in a flak vest not get pulled under a garage door by walkers. Clearly, the Pioneers believe in the crude but, tried-and-true axiom, that “Shit rolls downhill“, and, clearer still, Strand is at the bottom of that proverbial hill.
On the other hand, we have John, whose first appearance (Which comes directly after Strand’s) is him waking up in a bed, the grind clearly getting to him, as he stares blankly at the ceiling. John’s next scene features him holding a woman (Sherry?) inside a cage. Next, we see John firing his rifle as he stands in the bed of a truck pushing against a barricade holding back a herd of approximately sixty walkers (On what looks like the bridge leading to the general store upriver from John’s riverside cabin, which we saw in season four’s flashback episode, “Laura”). The next two scenes feature John digging a massive hole in the ground and him fighting a walker inside that same hole with the shovel he’d been using.
What it seems like is that John is being seen as valuable by Virginia, and is given more responsibility (And more freedom along with it), while Strand (And Alicia, too, by the look of things), because of his non-compliance to or subversion of Virginia’s rule, is given the jobs that put him at the highest risk of getting bitten, and monitored more closely.
Is this creating a rift between them? Is John, now with a wife to worry about, too afraid of the consequences of rebelling, and thinking Strand is putting them all in jeopardy by doing so?
Whatever the case, something like this is not just going to pop in and then pop out over one episode (Or shouldn’t, at the very least). This is gonna brew for a while, I think…