Fear the Walking Dead season 4 is making Morgan the new lead – and that’s a bad choice

Warning: Contains spoilers for Fear the Walking Dead season 4 episode 9 ‘People Like Us’.

Fear the Walking Dead is facing a big challenge as it heads into the second half of season four after the midseason finale delivered another devastating twist for its fans.

As fans long suspected, the episode confirmed that Madison (Kim Dickens) sacrificed herself back at the stadium to ensure that everyone else could escape, leaving Alicia (Alycia Debnam-Carey) as the only remaining character to be with the show from the very beginning.

That was a bold move to take after fans were already angered over the death of Nick (Frank Dillane) earlier in the season, but at least it gave a chance for the show to position Alicia as the new lead. The problem is that from the looks of the midseason premiere ‘People Like Us’, it’s crossover character Morgan (Lennie James) that is becoming the new lead and not Alicia.

We meet up with the gang again as they’ve gone their separate ways. Strand (Colman Domingo) is getting drunk in a mansion with Luciana (Danay Garcia) and technically Alicia is there as well, but she’s gone off on her own mission to see who’s putting notes on walkers asking for help. After he survived being shot by Alicia, John Dorie (Garret Dillahunt) is carrying on his recovery with June (Jenna Elfman) and Charlie (Alexa Nisenson), with the trio living on a school bus, and Al (Maggie Grace) is going about her business in her SWAT van.

The episode’s focus though is largely on Morgan (Lennie James) as he visits each group in tow to explain that he’s heading back to Alexandria and wants them to join him because it’s a “good place with good people”. “I never should have left. My friend, I think he was right. It’s where I belong, it’s where I should be,” he reflects.

None of them seem particularly keen to go, except for Al who agrees to drive him there, but after all the hype with Morgan crossing over, is it really possible that he’ll just head back? It’s made even less likely by the fact that The Walking Dead is now undergoing an 18-month time jump for season nine, so the only way Morgan has gone back is if his return to the parent show has been kept incredibly well-hidden.

We’re not ruling it out, of course, but a hint that Morgan won’t leave in season four comes during his chat with Alicia towards the end of the episode.

She’s devastated by the fact that she didn’t manage to rescue the person who was asking for help in time. “He was supposed to be alive. My mum would have found him, she would have saved him,” she notes, with Morgan comforting her by saying that Madison changed, so she can too. He asks her to “just be there” for Strand and Luciana, leading to this reply from Alicia: “I could, but you could be there for us too, right? Then why are you leaving?”

Maybe we’re just jumping to conclusions, but we worry that this means Morgan will choose to stick around as the ‘parental figure’ of the group, much like Madison was (at least in season four). Morgan’s whole shtick has been that he gets close to people and then they die, so if he does take a central position in the group, there’s a concern that we could just be stuck in the same endless cycle with Morgan.

He just hasn’t been an interesting character for some time now and while that could change, there’s much more potential in Alicia. Fear fans have spent the longer time with her, meaning we’re invested in her journey and her struggles to emulate the hero that Madison ended up becoming, while dealing with the tragic double loss of both her brother and her mother.

If Morgan does become the new lead of the show, it only lends weight to the fear that the spin-off has just become The Walking Dead 1.5 and not its own show.

We’ll have to see how that pans out over the remaining seven episodes of season four, but one thing that continues to mark out Fear compared to its parent show is its inventiveness. Even in an episode that’s largely a set-up outing, there are fun moments like a mass walker squishing by logs and a brilliantly crafted sequence as Strand takes on a walker in the background with Luciana unaware and listening to music.

The stand-out moment is just a tease of what’s to come though as we see walkers get whipped about by a tornado in the cold open, before we flash back and see as the storm builds up throughout the episode.

Yes, a walkernado (deadnado?) is coming – and we can’t wait.

Fear the Walking Dead airs on AMC in the US and on AMC on BT TV in the UK.

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