Fear the Walking Dead cast promises ‘epic’ Season 6 finish at WonderCon 2021

Virginia’s got everyone living on the edge, while masked outsiders threaten what passes for a fragile peace. As Fear the Walking Dead gets set to make its Season 6 return to AMC, is anybody safe?

Probably not — though the cast and creative minds behind FTWD aren’t sharing the secrets that await in the back half of Season 6. But during a virtual WonderCon panel discussion hosted Saturday by SYFY WIRE’s Tara Bennett, they assured fans that the remaining 9 episodes will definitely be epic — and none more epic than the finale.

“This finale has real big b***s,” teased franchise veteran Lennie James (Morgan Jones), to the laughter and total agreement of fellow cast members Jenna Elfman (June Dorie) and Colman Domingo (Victor Strand), as well as showrunners Ian Goldberg and Andrew Chambliss. “It’s epic and it’s massive, and it is also intimate and it’s tiny — and it all happens over such a short space of time. The entire finale, it’s like it happens over a held breath.”

While the panel shared a pair of sneak peeks (check them out in the full WonderCon clip above), of course no one would elaborate too much on how the ending will shape the survivors’ fates as they grapple with an increasingly erratic and desperate Virginia (Colby Minifie). But Elfman teased that the remaining episodes, continuing in the same anthology format that’s switched things up throughout Season 6, will ratchet the pressure high enough to leave everyone scarred (or worse) in the setup for Season 7. 

“The entire thing gets extremely potent for every character. Every character is going to be hit by impacts of life that truly change them,” said Elfman. “That will launch us into Season 7 in a way that just catapults the story, because every character is going to be profoundly changed by significant experiences they are going to go through, through each of these episodes in the back half.”

Fueling most of the chaos, of course, is Virginia's unpredictable and dangerous behavior as she loses her grip. Desperate to find her sister, Virginia's ruthlessness is on full razor's-edge display in the second of AMC’s sneak peeks above. “She’s cornered, and she’s kind of like a wounded animal,” said Chambliss. “There’s gonna be unexpected stuff coming from her” as the tension escalates each week. 

The upcoming episodes were produced after COVID-19 protocols changed the way the cast and crew operated on set, and Chambliss said that extra layer of adversity actually helped amplify the cast’s performance, while yielding some of the series’ coolest moments to date. 

“Honestly, these episodes are some of the best we’ve produced” in spite of the pandemic, he said. “[Season] 6B was really about turning the screws on everyone as much as we could…The end of this season is gonna have far-reaching changes… It’s really gonna change what this show is, going forward into Season 7.”

While no one’s spilling any spoilers on where it’s all headed, at least we have James' super-bold assurance that the story’s being served with a giant slice of audacity. And if everyone starts to panic, at least old-timers like Morgan and Strand will be there to anchor the survivors amid the storm. “Someone may die — but everyone else will survive,” teased Domingo, summing up Strand’s cool, pragmatic approach to keeping (most) everyone alive. As the show heads toward the Season 6 climax, it’s an approach they’re probably gonna need like never before.

New episodes of Fear the Walking Dead return to AMC on April 11, with each week’s episode debuting early on the preceding Thursday for AMC+ subscribers.