Dead Men Walking

Fear the Walking Dead: Did You Catch That Huge Season Finale Easter Egg?

The zombie drama might have just told its fans which character to expect in that much-anticipated Walking Dead crossover episode.
Michael Cudlitz as Abraham Ford in The Walking Dead.
Courtesy of Gene Page/AMC.
This post contains spoilers for the Fear the Walking Dead Season 3 finale.

Sunday night’s Fear the Walking Dead season finale was as explosive as ever—literally. As in, Nick blew up the dam everyone’s been squabbling over. The Season 3 closer also did away with a few characters we’ve gotten to know this season—Troy, Lola, and Efrain—and left basically all of the series’s main characters in peril: Madison, who was in a boat with Alicia and Strand, washed up on shore after the flood, but the other two are, until next season, missing. Same goes for Nick and an injured Daniel, who appeared to be standing on the dam as it went down.

Going into next season, it will be fascinating to see what the show’s new show-runners Andrew Chambliss and Ian Goldberg do with those loose ends. But perhaps even more fascinating is another prospect the finale introduced: did we just get a massive clue as to which character in the Walking Dead/Fear the Walking Dead universe will appear on both shows?

Earlier this month, Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman teased at New York Comic Con that a crossover episode is on its way, saying, “So what I’m going to say, and this is all I’m going to say, is that there are two Walking Dead shows. I’m not going to name them. But there are two. There’s one character that is going to go from one show that I will not name and appear in the other show, which I will not name.”

For a while, Madison has seemed like the safest bet, thanks to Alabama roots that would make a flashback reveal pretty easy to facilitate in The Walking Dead. She could still be the one, but Sunday night also included another tantalizing possibility: as villain Proctor John talked about his plan to set sail for “what’s left of Houston” with Alicia, some fans might have felt a distinctly nostalgic tingle. That would be because Walking Dead character Abraham Ford (R.I.P.), played by Michael Cudlitz, and his family originally rode out the apocalypse in a grocery store located in that Texas city. In an interview with Deadline, exiting show-runner Dave Erickson called the Houston reference “a happy coincidence.”

“The idea of Texas really came from the Proctor John character, nothing more planned there,” Erickson said. Still, it’s worth taking his comment with a large grain of salt—especially as he makes his exit and new show-runners take over. Besides, let’s not forget what Cudlitz himself tweeted just after Kirkman’s crossover announcement: “Crazy shit is about to go down. See y’all on the other side.”