Fear The Walking Dead Timeline - Digital Spy

With The Walking Dead's farewell to Rick involving yet another massive time jump for the series, we decided we'd get through the grieving process by embarking on the fairly mammoth task of putting together a guide to the franchise's baffling timeline.

All of the following has been officially confirmed on screen – which means that A LOT (seriously, a LOT) has happened to our Fear / Walking Dead pals over a relatively short period of time.

It's probably best you ignore how much Carl ages over the course of eight seasons, which is actually the least of the logic problems when examining the timelines of these series, right up until season nine.

Year Zero

Around 131 days before the Global Outbreak, the Wildfire virus starts to reanimate corpses without the public being aware of what's going on.

People go about their lives doing normal stuff, like being addicted to booze (Hershel), getting high in an abandoned church / makeshift crackhouse (Nick) and being given a gun as a present before a family road trip (Andrea and Amy).

So, despite the fact they're totally not aware of it at the time, the zombie virus is getting ready to devastate the world when cops Rick and Shane get into a shootout with a bunch of bad dudes and Rick ends up in the hospital in a coma, like he's the world's biggest 28 Days Later fanboy.

Year One

The whole of Fear The Walking Dead's first two seasons take place in the early stages of Year One, when the Global Outbreak first hits and turns the world into Zack Snyder's Dawn of the Dead in slow-mo.

Almost two months after the breakout, Rick Grimes wakes up from his coma. Remarkably, Fear takes until season three to catch up to this section of the timeline (they're on that weird survivalist ranch when Rick's waking up). Which means that the Fear gang had basically the most insanely action-packed couple of months in the history of civilisation: escaping Los Angeles, becoming seafarers, heading to Mexico and setting up on the ranch.

Meanwhile, The Walking Dead team use their first few seasons to cover the first year of the outbreak, which is slightly more credible but still pretty astonishing.

It means that our heroes go from their first camp, to the CDC, to the farm, to the prison, to the Governor's town, then back to the prison over the space of a year in the timeline.

That's a lot of upheaval, dudes – we hope you never have to go through a lettings agency, they frown upon this much housemoving.

Morgan, meanwhile, manages to keep things relatively chill, shifting from staying in one place surrounded by a bunch of traps (day 314), to accidentally burning down his apartment (day 321), to going on a kill spree (days 321-324), to getting locked up by a pacifist (days 324-330) and learning how to be Donatello (day 330), over the course of around two weeks towards the end of the first year.

Year Two

If you thought the first twelve months of The Walking Dead's timeline were action-packed, brace yourself.

Season four starts at around day 500 of the outbreak. Season eight starts at around day 621. This was confirmed in a tweet from AMC.

It means that, over the course of Year Two, our heroes… *deep breath*... Experience a deadly flu, watch Hershel get killed by the Governor before their prison home is destroyed, travel to Terminus, get captured by cannibals, and go to Grady (a hospital run by homicidal officials, where Beth is killed).

Then, they go to a supposedly safe community called Alexandria, where they're attacked by a gang of weirdos calling themselves Wolves, who use zombies to attack the town.

THEN they discover another rival gang, who call themselves the Saviors, and decide to kill them in their beds (after the year they've had, who can blame them?) starting a war with a rockabilly with a baseball bat called Negan. (The warlord is called Negan. The bat is called Lucille.)

Oh, and they also discover another community called The Kingdom, run by a dude with a pet tiger. To be honest, meeting a dude with a pet tiger would be enough for us to have an eventful year, so goodness knows how Rick feels.

Season four of Fear The Walking Dead kicks off during the second year of the outbreak, with a time jump allowing for Morgan to join the Fear cast shortly after the events of The Walking Dead's All Out War. A dam blows up and they all go to Texas, they find a broken plane, fix it, and by the end of season five, they've taken off... but they still haven't launched into the third year post-apocalypse, so it's bye-bye to the Fear crew for now.

Year Three

Season nine of The Walking Dead starts on day 1170, so around halfway through Year Three. It's basically a massive holiday compared to Year Two, with the gang mostly focused on building a bridge and teasing Rick Grimes' final episode.

Year Seven

We sort of get a look at Year Seven in season eight, with the Old Man Rick visions that bookend the season's opening and Carl's death (yes, we think the vision belongs to Rick, but it's actually the hallucination of a dying Carl).

But as it's all imaginary, we're not sure it counts, unless AMC decides that one of the movies they're contracted to make with Andrew Lincoln will take the form of a feature-length adaptation of this nonsense.

Year Eight

What definitely does count (unless it also turns out to be the vision of a feverish AMC executive) is the time-jump that comes at the end of Rick's last episode (season nine, episode five – 'What Comes After'), which sees 10-year-old Judith putting on Rick's hat after saving a bunch of new cast members.

Her age is significant – Judith's now the same age as Carl when The Walking Dead first started, which is a nice way to open The Walking Dead's biggest reboot (though some old favourites will still be part of the show for a while yet).

And perhaps to combat any potential Chandler Riggs-style growth spurts from new-Judith Cailey Fleming between now and season 18, the show made yet another time jump in season nine – lining up the show with the real-world timeline, yay!

Year Nine

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We're actually really glad they this opportunity to speed things up a bit, especially as, not only have we caught up with what this show should have logically been doing from the start (guys: one year / one season – it's not rocket science), we're on target to do the same in season ten (season nine ends after nine years and seven months have passed – which means we're only one five month time jump away from this thing staying consistent).

Whether that's linked to Scott Gimple's desire to create an undead MCU (with another new show launching next year to further complicate this timeline), or it's to protect the cast from the signs of ageing, we have no idea – but we're glad it's happened.

From 'The Calm Before' onwards, we're on day 3,397, so we're firmly into year nine (the episode sees the four main communities coming together for the first time in years), and it makes the implausibly action-packed lives of these characters just a little bit more believable.

Well, about as believable as a show featuring dead human fleshchompers – and people who wear zombie skin-masks on their faces – can ever be.

Because, that's right, Year Nine saw the introduction of The Whisperers, led by Samantha Morton's Alpha, who appeared to be making sartorial decisions based on the Texas Chain Saw Massacre (like Leatherface, they wear human skin as masks). Spoiler alert: they're not goodies.

Year Ten

They only ruddy bloody did it, you guys! Season 10 takes place entirely in one logical year for the first time since the show began. Whether they'll keep the timeline consistent by heading into Year Eleven for season 11, only God (Gimple) knows, but we'll take the wins where we can get them. Especially as season 10 proved to be such a tricky time for our heroes. There was a lot of death to mark the first decade of the dawdling demised, with several side characters (and one major one) meeting their makers during the early stages of the Whisperer War.

Seriously, this season made the Red Wedding look like... well, a normal wedding, complete with lovely cake, dad dancing, and emotional speeches – and we're still recovering from it.

Hell, we were even sad to see – BIG MASSIVE SPOILER ALERT – Alpha go. Despite the fact Beta does appear to be a formidable replacement, we were hoping to see Samantha Morton make it to the show's 20th anniversary (yeah, yeah, we know, Alpha dies even earlier in the comics, but still – it's Samantha Morton!).

But, if there's one thing we've learned from 10 years of watching this thing, that's to expect the unexpected. So, here's to another decade of preposterous plotting, contractual twists, and enough crazy weekly events to fill a normal human's lifetime (though a lot of The Walking Dead's pacing is looking a lot more realistic after the summer of 2020). Because, as the old saying (sort of) goes, if it ain't dead, don't walk it. Also, if Daryl dies, we (still) riot.

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Sam Ashurst

Freelancer writer

Sam is an entertainment writer with NCTJ accreditation and a twenty-year career as a film journalist.

Starting out as a staff writer at Total Film, moving up to Deputy Online Editor, Sam was responsible for Total Film’s YouTube channel, where he revolutionised the magazine’s approach to video junkets, creating influential formats that spread to other outlets.

He’s interviewed a wide range of film icons, including directors such as David Lynch, Quentin Tarantino, Paul Thomas Anderson, Sofia Coppola, Ridley Scott, Michael Bay and Sam Raimi, as well as actors such as Meryl Streep, Nic Cage, Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Anne Hathaway, Margot Robbie, Natalie Portman, Kermit the Frog, all of the Avengers and many more.

Sam has also interviewed several comic creators, including Stan Lee, Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, and he has a zombie cameo in The Walking Dead comic. In 2014, Sam went freelance, working directly for film studios including Warner Brothers, 20th Century Fox and Disney, as well as covering red carpet events for film marketing company PMA Productions.

Sam is the co-host, producer and editor of the Arrow Video podcast, which has seen year-on-year growth since its creation in 2017, gaining over half a million listens in that time.

His byline has appeared in outlets such as Yahoo, MTV, Dazed, Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar, Cosmopolitan, Elle, and Good Housekeeping among others.

In 2012, Sam made it to the final of the Leicester Square Theatre New Comedian of the Year competition, and went on to become a filmmaker himself, directing three features that have all played major festivals, and secured distribution – starring in two of them.

Jim Carrey once mistook Sam for Johnny Cash, and John Carpenter told him to ‘Keep up the good work.’ He promises to try his best.

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