'Fear the Walking Dead' Boss Dave Erickson Talks Season 2, Swimming Zombies

Warning: Fear the Walking Dead Season 2 storyline and character spoilers ahead.

If the “No Safe Harbor” message doesn’t make it clear, the spooky skeleton shadow hanging over the yacht in the new key art for Fear the Walking Dead’s second season seals it: The apocalypse is in full swing now, and that means nothing but amped up danger ahead.

Credit: AMC Film Holdings LLC

Yahoo TV talked to FTWD showrunner Dave Erickson for a preview of the new season, and, as was teased in the Season 1 finale, Strand’s yacht is going to be a major factor in Madison (Kim Dickens) and Travis’s (Cliff Curtis) plans. Erickson also talks about Maddie’s backstory, the (possible) return of Tobias, and settles that question about whether or not zombies can swim.

Lots of zombies in the water in the FTWD trailers, so: Can zombies swim, or at least can they float purposefully?
Zombies cannot swim. That’s one of the things we have been experimenting with and something we have worked our way through in the first couple of episodes. They can’t really swim, but they can wade, which can be creepy and awesome, but no, they have not mastered any strokes at all. They’re not swimmers, they’re walkers.

There is a transition in this season. [In Season 1] we wanted to see infected, the dead who seemed very close to being alive, because it put a lot more pressure, emotional and psychological pressure, on our characters. That’s not something we want to move away from completely. We’re still going to be dealing with the freshly turned. We’re still going to be dealing with the difficulty for our people to kill, walker or not. I think that’s important. But we’re now… Season 1, if you broke it down, we were about two to three weeks into the apocalypse. We’ve got some time where there’s going to be a number of our dead who are a little bit more desiccated. Then there’s going to be a number that have been exposed to salt water and to the elements, to the heat outside. We’ll be seeing an evolution with the look of our dead.

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What about the pace? One of the best things about the first season was getting to see how they experience the apocalypse at the beginning and how different that is from where we meet the characters on The Walking Dead. Now things are advancing in the apocalypse, so will that be reflected in the pace of the series?
There’s a lot of adventure on the high seas. Something I came to realize last season, going into the break on Season 2, is we were relatively insulated, meaning we spent the first couple of episodes with the outbreak beginning and then just… at the very moment we started to realize how terribly wrong things were [for the survivors], we were in essentially a quarantine camp for two episodes, and not terribly sure what was happening [beyond] the fences. I think we blew our characters away in the finale… they finally saw the scope and scale of things. As we move into Season 2, we know L.A. is not doing well, we’ve heard news reports. We have suspicions about this happening across the country, but we don’t really know. That sense of anxiety, that total anxiety and apprehension and fear that we tried to generate in Season 1, that slow burn element, it is actually something that can play into our seascape to a certain degree. There’s an acceleration, because our characters are better educated and may now understand what they’re dealing with to some degree.

They’re all going on Strand’s yacht in Season 2, or that was the plan at the end of Season 1…
It’s important that even as things begin to balloon, and we go full apocalypse, the tonal elements and the tension that we get, especially on the boat… you’re taking a family, this forced blended family, and you’ve got Strand, who we really don’t know from Adam. That’s going to be an interesting arc to watch as the season progresses. You’ve got [Daniel] and Ofelia, who have just lost Griselda. They’re closer to our group. They become part of the family, but one of the things that we do express over the season is that question that Dr. Exner posed last season, which is, what is family now? Is it blood or is it bond? That to me is an interesting exploration, because I think we’ll have characters who are put in a position where the greater good of the group may not be what’s best for the person that you’re closest to. Definitely high stakes on the high seas. I think there’s more discoveries for them to have in terms of how far has this spread, where is it safe to land? That’s a fundamental question for our characters in the first few episodes: Where the hell are we going? They’re going to quickly realize that it’s really no safer on the ocean than it is on land. They’re going to be caught between the vast expanse of the Pacific and then the dangers that wait for them back on land. It’s them trying to find a balance between those two things.

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The boat also opens up a ton of possibilities. Strand said in Season 1 that it’s full of supplies. He’s planned for this, but no matter how much he’s packed on there, there obviously could come a point where they run out of supplies. On the other hand, if they keep the yacht in working order, there’s always the possibility they can go look for supplies or other survivor groups, or that they can float around and get more info about how widespread this is. Is that something that’s going to be a storyline continuing throughout the season?
Yeah, that’s one of the great things about the Abigail, that she is equipped. It opens doors to us in terms of what our final destination might be, because it is a vessel that can go great distances. That’ll be one of the fundamental questions for the season: Do we go north? Do we go south? Do we go further west? I’m sure Cliff Curtis would love us to go to New Zealand, but I don’t think we’re going to make it that far. The vessel also, it’s an item of value. It is something to potentially be coveted. The thing we’re going to realize fairly quickly is we weren’t the only people with the bright idea to go to sea. We’ve got thousands of miles of coastline and a lot of boats and a lot of people. Part of the interesting dynamic is what happens on the water, and always maintaining that balance of the danger from people versus infected; [danger from people] is sometimes greater, if not at the very least equal.

Madison proved herself right away to be such a savvy, tough survivor. I think we all want to know where that comes from. Will her backstory be explored more in Season 2?
I think we have a number of characters who have rather complicated stories to tell, Madison, Strand, Daniel… we’re looking at finding the most elegant ways to go deeper into those stories.

What are some of the other bigger issues you want to explore in Season 2?
There are going to be elements of displacement. Our family managed to get to this vessel, but they’ve had to abandon their home. It’s interesting to see what’ll happen to our characters, and also people they come across who have been removed from all they know. It’s one thing to be land-bound and fighting the dead. It’s another thing to be doing that in a completely foreign environment, especially… there’s something about the ocean to me and the vastness of it and the danger of it. There’s nothing that freaks me out more than the idea of being stuck in the middle of the ocean with no land anywhere and feeling completely emotionally and physically adrift. They’re on this journey, and the hope is they find a place, that they find a home. I think there’s danger and fear that go with that search, obviously, because the risk is that there may not be a place to land, ever. They don’t really know. I do think it also allows for a certain level of hope. I think that’s something the original show has explored and explored quite beautifully. Never mind that you’re going to fight and kill walkers; It creates a desperate need for certainty for something. That’s what our characters have been manufacturing.

For Travis, all of them, what they have to do to survive is only going to get more extreme. Has Travis started to accept that in Season 2, especially after what happened with Liza?
Travis is in a very interesting place, because he, more than anyone else, tried to hold on to his moral compass last season, and he paid for it. The horrible irony is that he was the one who had to kill another human being by the end of the season. Both Liza and Madison at separate times said, “Don’t let Travis do it. It’ll break him.” I think that’s one of the questions to be explored in Season 2: Did it? There’s also the distance that existed between Travis and Chris. There was already this anger and resentment, and now they have to work through the fact that Travis had to put down Chris’s mom.

Does [Travis] finally understand what the apocalypse is, and does he finally understand that these people are dead and they’re a threat? That answer’s yes. Travis has gone through his apocalyptic education. He goes into the season knowing that you cannot reason with the dead. I think he’s also going to have a tunnel vision focus on trying to restore his relationship with his son and protecting his son. And killing a few zombies at the same time.

I asked you this every week last season, and I have to ask again: Is there any chance we’ll see Tobias again in Season 2?
I cannot promise that in the body of the season. I can say this: I love Lincoln [A. Castellanos] as an actor, and I love that character. I know he is a fan favorite, and I am trying to figure out a dynamic by which we can get to tell the Tobias story. I am exploring it, and I can’t promise anything, but I am exploring it.

Related: ‘Fear the Walking Dead’: Lincoln Castellanos on Playing Tobias the Apocalypse Whisperer

Were you surprised by how much everyone gravitated towards the character?
The thing about that character is there’s something about being the first to know. There’s something about the way Lincoln played him, where there’s an innocence there. There’s a frustration. He speaks to a lot of people who feel marginalized and who have an answer and know what’s going on, and people won’t hear them, won’t listen to them. Nobody hears him until it’s too late. I think there’s a compassion to him as well, which I really like. So no, I’m not surprised. He was our first prophet of the apocalypse. He knew the story before anybody else, and I think everybody was like, “You should listen to Tobias, why is nobody listening to him?”

Fear the Walking Dead Season 2 premieres April 10 at 9 p.m. on AMC.