When AMC first announced that its spin-off series of The Walking Dead would have the title Fear The Walking Dead, many questioned the logic behind such a simplistic title.
The title caused such controversy with fans of the original series that even TV Guide made fun of it and came up with a list of better alternative titles after writing that Fear The Walking Dead "blows."
However, those fans laughing at the title probably just didn't get it and forgot about a speech from The Walking Dead's fifth season made by Rick Grimes when he tells a story about his grandfather going to war. In that story, Rick explains that his grandfather considered himself dead every day before he'd go out to fight and that this was how Rick and his group needed to see their own lives. Rick tells the group that this is how they survive.
"We are the walking dead," said Rick in that speech.
That speech shares some similarities to a scene in the fourth episode of Fear The Walking Dead, where Madison (Kim Dickens) tells Daniel (Rubén Blades) about something she saw in an abandoned neighborhood.
"A man, shot like the others, like the rest," Madison says in the scene. "But he wasn't sick. And there were others like that."
This prompts Daniel to tell Madison a story from his youth.
The moral? The Walking Dead aren't the zombies. The Walking Dead are those still walking around as humans, and those humans are what the "fear" refers to in Fear The Walking Dead.
Of course, Fear The Walking Dead is a series that isn't really about zombies at all, but about how regular humans respond to the beginning of the zombie apocalypse. Unlike The Walking Dead, the characters on Fear The Walking Dead aren't cops, hunters or outlaws, so the storytelling hits a different kind of dramatic note.
"We've structured season 1 to be about the building dread, the anxiety and paranoia, and the not knowing," said Fear The Walking Dead executive producer David Erickson to FOX411. "The goal was to create a different kind of tension. We've structured it in a way that our characters are somewhat insulated from what's really going on in the outside world throughout much of the season."
Fear the Walking Dead airs on AMC on Sundays.
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