Fear The Walking Dead Theory: The Battle Of Three Armies

When Fear The Walking Dead returns, Alicia and Strand will go to war, but I don’t think they’ll be the only ones fighting. As the first half of this season ended, Alicia declared war on Strand. This has been something I’ve focused on a lot over the last few weeks, mostly because I find the circumstances that led to it entirely avoidable. The likely results are far more disastrous for Strand and Alicia and their respective groups than they would need to be.

Being relatively safe and secure in his tower, Strand can grow and raise food has a clear advantage over Alicia and Morgan. They are based in the U.S.S. Pennsylvania in Galveston, Texas, deep in the heart of the wasteland, and have only a little over a week’s worth of food to sustain their population with.

On the other hand, if Strand wanted to attack Alicia and Morgan, it would force him and his troops to fight inside the sub, which would open them up to ambush inside the ship’s tight corridors. Or they could choose to fight them outside on the irradiated shores of Galveston, putting them in danger every second they’re out there. However things go, people will die, and they don’t need to.

This is all going on the assumption that the war will just be between Strand’s group and Alicia and Morgan’s, and I don’t think that will be the case.

Fear the Walking Dead theory: The Stalkers will go to war with Strand, Alicia and Morgan

Did everyone just forget that the Stalkers are still around? It kind of seems like it.

Neither Strand, Alicia, nor Morgan mentioned anything about Arno or the Stalkers in the midseason finale. This is for a couple of reasons, the most apparent being that Arno got scared away from his siege of The Tower by Grace with help from the MRAP. The group didn’t return nor disrupt Alicia and Morgan’s quest to find PADRE. And, with the revelation of what Strand had done, Alicia was obviously too enraged at him to bother worrying about anyone else.

To be honest, I also think there’s a bit of “Out of sight, out of mind” going on among fans, too. With the midseason finale focusing so much on Alicia (Who’d only just returned after being missing for nearly half a season), her quest to find PADRE, and her eventual declaration of war on Strand, I think Arno seemed to get forgotten, despite appearing several times in Alicia’s flashbacks. Perhaps people believe he died when Grace countered his siege with the MRAP? Well, if Madison’s return is anything to go by, then people need to remember unless they see a character die, they shouldn’t consider them dead.

As to the war itself, Morgan and Strand, at the very least, should be very wary of the fact that Arno, even if his catapult was damaged, still has walkers, he probably still has explosives, and he still has chunks of the dud warhead. That and his skills at carpentry probably wouldn’t take much for him to make a new catapult and launch his mini barrage of radioactive walkers at both The Tower and the Pennsylvania, potentially contaminating everyone and everything at either place.

In last week’s Survival Rule Of The Week, I mentioned that because Arno is against Strand does not make him Alicia’s friend. Clearly, at some point during Alicia’s time in the Franklin Hotel’s bunker, Arno realized she was attempting to restart things by finding PADRE, and that being the complete opposite of what Teddy wanted, made a concerted effort to impede her. The very reason why the Stalkers were stripping walkers was to make them indistinguishable from Senator Vasquez should Alicia have lost track of him and make PADRE that much more difficult to find. At best, this was his attempt to get Alicia to recreate civilization — Effectively, trying to force her to comply with Teddy’s wishes and definitely not the actions of a friend.

I’m willing to bet that, when the season returns, we’ll learn more about the breakdown of things underneath the Franklin Hotel as Alicia recovered, particularly why Arno now leads a sub-faction of Teddy’s recruits, and Alicia leads the rest. My guess is that Alicia’s desire to rebuild the old world, the world Teddy wanted to destroy, did not go over well with Arno, and he decided to stop her before she even got a chance.

With that in mind, what do you think Arno will do once he realizes that the people who stopped Teddy from carrying out his goal in the first place are now fighting amongst themselves? Do you think he’ll just sit on the sidelines? Or, do you think that he’ll take this opportunity to wipe out all of his mentor’s enemies all in one fell swoop? I’m going with the latter option.

The enemy of your enemy is your enemy.

But, what do you think? Do you think Alicia and Strand’s war will just be between them, or do you think their mutual enemy, Arno, will make his presence known with more radioactive walkers? Let me know! I’m curious! And, if you enjoyed this and want to learn how to stay alive in a zombie apocalypse, why not pick up a copy of my book, The Rules: A Guide To Surviving The Zombie Apocalypse! You can also get it at Amazon here, on iTunes here!