Forever the Rudy to The Walking Dead’s Peyton Manning, Fear The Walking Dead is gearing up for its season two debut on April 10. The story finds our protagonists taking to the water in an effort to avoid the zombie apocalypse, which makes sense, because that worked out really well for the people in Dawn Of The Dead. Still, it provokes the obvious question: Can zombies swim? Over the weekend, some of the show’s cast and crew attended the PaleyFest panel on the AMC series, and Deadline reports EP/showrunner Dave Erickson had a firm reply to the query—even if he then went out of his way to stress that the answer doesn’t really matter, because no one is ever safe, anywhere.
“They can wade,” Erickson said, presumably while checking “serious discussion about water-bound zombie capabilities vis-a-vis the dog paddle” off his bucket list. “We’ve figured out the best ways to shoot water zombies. They don’t drown. They keep floating back up.” An exclusive clip from the upcoming season showed Nick Clark (Frank Dilane) under water with a zombie floating immediately overhead, so recreational swimming is off the list of activities for the foreseeable future. Instead, the characters will be involved in the tricky business of building trust and alliances among one another—star Kim Dickens mentioned that her character, Madison, has “good instincts to not trust these new characters,” but will nonetheless establish some “uncomfortable alliances that she has to.”
Additionally, those hoping our seafaring adventurers would somehow come across Rick and Michonne, possibly fly-fishing for whales in a hydrofoil (as long as you’re living in fantasy land, just go for it), are going to remain forever disappointed. “No,” Erickson said firmly in response to the possibility of a crossover. “That’s the one straight answer I can give you.” Americans aren’t exactly geography wizards, so perhaps not all viewers realize the odds of people floating on the Pacific Ocean stumbling across a hardy band of survivors on the East coast are slim. They just live in the same universe, and the same zombies rules hold for both shows. (“Anything that has been established in the comics we have to follow,” Erickson stressed.) So there won’t be any decomposing bodies briskly butterfly-stroking towards the boat, and if a horde of zombies envelops them, Madison and company should quickly pull themselves under the nearest dumpster.