Author: Josh Wigler / Source: The Hollywood Reporter
[This story contains spoilers for the season four finale of AMC’s Fear the Walking Dead, “…I Lose Myself.”]
For Morgan Jones (Lennie James), the Aikido disciple who crossed over from The Walking Dead into Fear the Walking Dead territory at the outset of season four, the story ended as it began — at least in a manner of speaking.
Sunday’s finale focused heavily on Morgan and his pursuit to help the menacing Martha, the so-called “filthy woman” played by Tonya Pickens. So much for that. Martha wound up besting Morgan, if only briefly, skewering his leg and keeping him from helping his friends in need — friends who Martha managed to poison with antifreeze. Eventually opting to neither kill nor save Martha, Morgan broke free from her clutches, returned to Alicia (Alycia Debnam-Carey) and the rest of the gang, and hooked them up with a truck filled with beer brewed by the late Jim (Aaron Stanford).
“You can in fact chug beer as a cure,” co-showrunner Andrew Chambliss tells The Hollywood Reporter about the finale’s unusual ticking-time-bomb situation. “You just need to drink a lot of it, or drink beer with a high enough alcohol content to counteract the antifreeze.”
Unfortunately, copious amounts of alcohol can’t cure the zombie apocalypse. Fortunately, Morgan offers up another possible panacea: hope. The Walking Dead alum tells his new friends that he no longer wants to return to Alexandria, dashing plans for any further crossovers, at least in the near future. Instead, he plans to help as many survivors in the nearby area as he can, so they don’t wind up like Martha (who eventually died and zombified from wounds sustained earlier in the season), or worse. The season ends with Morgan and the rest setting up shop at a factory, arming themselves with new trucks and supplies, and roaring off into the wild as an end-of-the-world rescue crew.
While he began his time on Fear the Walking Dead as a loner looking to avoid people, Morgan arrived at a full-circle moment at the end of the season, complete with imagery meant to call back to his first appearance in the Fear side of the AMC zombie universe. According to Chambliss and his fellow showrunner Ian Goldberg, Morgan and his friends’ desire to help people will form the spine of season five. Here’s what the Fear bosses tell THR about how they came up with their ending for season four, what to expect from season five, an update on how far along they are in the planning and production stages, and how a certain figure from Fear seasons past is fixing for a comeback.
How did you settle on the ending for season four?
Andrew Chambliss: The idea for where we wanted to end all of these characters, we had it at the beginning of the season. We knew we were telling a story about them going from a dark and hopeless place to a place of hope. More than that, we wanted to get them to a place where they could spread that philosophy and that idea. They wanted to make up for all of the bad things they did. They wanted to have a mission that would allow them to achieve their redemption. The final moments of the episode, where they’re driving out into the world to find other people who were like them at the beginning of the season — in need of help, both physical and emotional — that was something we had from the very beginning. The details surrounding that was what we worked on as we developed the season.
There’s a full-circle quality to the episode: Morgan traveling toward a person rather than away from people, Morgan suffering a leg injury, as two examples. What did you feel you needed to accomplish, in terms of closing loops?
Ian Goldberg: As it relates to Morgan, that’s absolutely right. In many ways, we were returning to the themes and images we started with Morgan in [the season premiere]. The biggest one was in his first interview with Al, when he told her, “I lose people, and then I lose myself.” We really wanted Morgan to confront that head-on in this episode. The way we had him confront that was through Martha. She’s someone who Morgan had come to know and has seen a lot of himself in. He’s told her, “You’re stuck.” He understands what it’s like to be…
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