Fear the Walking Dead drops Season 6 teaser and shambles towards an October debut

Fear the Walking Dead will return for its sixth season on Sunday, Oct. 11, at 9:00 p.m. EST. AMC announced the premiere date for the Walking Dead spinoff during the show's two-part Comic-Con@Home panel, which also featured the first teaser trailer for Season 6. As you'll see, a violent bounty hunter is after Morgan Jones (Lennie James), whose eyes turn a mysterious red.

"It’s not allergies. There’s something going on with Morgan," executive producer Andrew Chambliss joked of James' crossover character. Per Chambliss, they were almost done shooting the first half of the new season before everything shut down. All episodes are written, though.

"I think he'd be happy that his friend is still alive," James admitted when moderator Chris Hardwick asked what Rick Grimes would make of Mr. Jones in Season 6. "But I also think that he might be really worried what will be left of his friend ... what might remain. I think he might be very scared at the prospect of who his friend might be or where his friend might be."

See the teaser for yourself:

Promising a darker tone for Season 6, executive producer Ian Goldberg teased an "anthology structure to the episodes" that allows for a "deep dive into exactly what these characters are going through within Virginia's communities."  "Our characters are not the masters of their own universe anymore," he stated.

"They are living under Virginia's rule ... it's a big paradigm shift. The thing that we were really interested in exploring in Season 6 is: 'What does that do to these characters now that they're living under completely different circumstances?' We're gonna see some very different shades of these characters this season because they're all gonna be tested in ways maybe they haven't been tested before."

The upcoming season will also feature the directorial debut of Lennie James, whose episode heavily features Alicia Clark (Alycia Debnam-Carey) and Victor Strand (Colman Domingo). "Once I got over myself, I had a really good time," James said of besting his nerves.

And get ready to keep track of when you are, because Scott M. Gimple, who heads the entire Walking Dead franchise for AMC, hinted at the existence of multiple time jumps. Despite Hardwick's lighthearted claim that Gimple can never give a firm answer to questions, the spoiler-conscious brand manager did disclose that "the format is gonna be very, very unusual" when compared to the wider Walking Dead universe. "We're gonna have these 16 little movies that all sort of fold into each other."

He concluded that the characters of Fear fall in the middle of the survivor spectrum when placed alongside the characters found in the main series (i.e. fully evolved survivors) and World Beyond (i.e. green-horned survivors).

Watch the full panel below:

Click here for SYFY WIRE's full coverage of Comic-Con@Home 2020.