In AMC’s Walking Dead franchise, it’s not just the zombies that seem to keep popping up. With the wild success of The Walking Dead that saw audiences everywhere buying cowboy hats and making ear necklaces to the record-breaking spinoff Fear the Walking Dead that has already been renewed for a second season, it is no surprise that AMC is expanding the Walking Dead franchise even further with an upcoming web series. Fear the Walking Dead: Flight 462 will tell the story of a group of passengers unfortunately aboard a commercial airplane just as society begins to falter in the face of the outbreak.
Fear the Walking Dead: Flight 462 will air in 16 parts, debuting first on AMC.com on October 4th and then airing during commercial breaks throughout Season 6 of The Walking Dead. Unfortunately for fans who prefer to go on bathroom breaks during commercials so as to avoid wetting themselves from zombie jump scares, the installments of the Flight 462 will be directly relevant to the plot of Fear in that one of the characters will survive to join the cast for Season 2.
Of course, the web series would not be particularly interesting if it were just 16 installments of characters picking up zombie news on their smartphones and laptops. The lives of those on board and the stability of the plane will be threatened when the flight takes a zombie turn as a passenger dies mid-flight.
The connections between Flight 462 and the rest of the Walking Dead universe should be relatively seamless, thanks to the production team that happens to largely overlap with Fear the Walking Dead.
Despite a premise that is rather similar to a memorable airplane sequence from World War Z and that practically writes the Snakes on a Plane jokes itself, Flight 462 will show the Walking Dead universe in an entirely new context. The Walking Dead in its sixth season features a group whose modern conveniences have recently only extended as far as running water and what electricity is afforded them from solar power, and even the family unit of Fear the Walking Dead that has yet to experience true devastation is past the point of travel by air. We may be able to see the failures of modern technology in the face of a zombie outbreak that Fear has somewhat glossed over.
The plane setting also explains a curious scene from an episode of Fear that saw a jet flying overhead that neither crashed nor exploded. Fear is already setting the stage for Flight 462, and the overlap of the web series with The Walking Dead may well serve to increase viewers for the second season of Fear, as well as entertain on its own.
