Anti-Climax Boss: Season 7's main antagonists, Arno and Strand end up going down without much of a fight. Arno gets the tables turned on him by Daniel and is fed to walkers by him, with his surviving followers joining the group with little fuss; while Strand ultimately refuses to go to war with Alicia and ends up pulling a Heel–Face Turn at her insistence. The same can be said for Wes, who becomes The Starscream and betrays Strand towards the end of the season. And in the very same episode, he's impaled by Strand with little fanfare.
Arc Fatigue: The show has come under criticism since Season 4 due to perceived lack of plot progression, most notably in Seasons 6 and 7. A conflict between groups of survivors will arise, or a declaration of war will take place, but the show will take its time to get to the fighting, with scenes more dedicated to monologues and character work. This particularly came under fire in late Season 7 when Alicia declared war on the Tower, but the following episodes were laidback character pieces.
Ass Pull: The show's tendency to tell and not show, particularly in latter seasons, often results in major plot developments or conflicts being resolved offscreen. Several characters randomly escape from dangerous situations with no fanfare, often using hallucinations (a tried and true Scott Gimple trope) to excuse why a character didn't see what happened. Even the show's Grand Finale indulges in this twice, with two major escapes from dangerous situations taking place entirely offscreen and characters having to catch up another after the fact.
A vast majority of fans believe that Season 4 marked the moment when the series began going downhill. Aside from Morgan from the main show coming back and stealing the protagonist spotlight from the Clarke family, two of its prominent members, Nick and Madison, are killed off and Put on a Bus respectively. It does not help that the arcs had become repetitive and characterization took a deep nosedive to the point characters contradict themselves from time to time. Season 4 and 5 were criticized for being Lighter and Softer and having unremarkable antagonists (with Martha from Season 4 being the worst offender), and while Season 6 managed to briefly win back the crowd with Teddy Maddox being a memorable villain with unnaturally grandiose yet destructive goals, Season 7 immediately re-introduced several problems from past seasons and rendered the main conflict totally pointless by destroying the Tower in a squabble between Strand and Alicia. While Morgan finally left the show halfway through Season 8 and allowed Madison to take back the protagonist role, it was too late as the damage had already been done.
The most hardcore fans believe that the era started as early as Season 3, which opened with Travis getting killed very anticlimatically and as such paved the way for Morgan taking over his role.
Awesomeness Withdrawal: One of the biggest reasons why Flight 462 was disliked was because the episodes were only shown once in-between commercial breaks, and didn't leave as big of an effect as the hour-long episodes of both shows due to their infrequent airings. The next series of shorts initially aired side-by-side with the season of The Walking Dead that followed the airing of Fear the Walking Dead Season 2, but were instead put up on the website halfway through likely due to complaints of this trope in regards to Flight 462 and people not wanting to go through the same thing again with these new shorts.
Morgan. Many felt as though his story had already been told on The Walking Dead and were disappointed when he became the protagonist of this show, at the cost of its original main characters, Madison and Nick.
Althea. Some viewers enjoy the character and think she's one of the better Season 4 additions, others think she's too one-note and find her character motivation, documenting people's "stories", to be annoying and uninteresting. Her Day In The Limelight won some skeptics to her side, given it was pretty much the only episode of Season 5 to be positively received.
Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: The penultimate episode of the series brings back Ben/Crane as an antagonist, which completely flies in the face of his last appearance where he peacefully surrendered and seemingly joined the reformed group. This marks his first appearance since then and reveals he snuck away offscreen and plotted to take back the island for himself with absolutely no build-up. The way he suddenly dies from a very preventable death at the hands of a few walkers makes the situation even weirder.
Captain Obvious Reveal: Alejandro not really being The Immune was pretty obvious to most viewers since he's never fought actual infected before in his life and his refusal to give details was a dead giveaway. Not to mention the fact that we already know that's not how zombies work in the Walking Dead universe.
Complete Monster: "Wrath" through "Children of Wrath": Jeremiah Otto Sr. is the racist and abusive patriarch of the Otto family, and created Broke Jaw Ridge on the stolen land of Natives. Jeremiah lynched several Natives, including Qaletaqa Walker's father and uncle, before the outbreak, and after the apocalypse, allows a bloody war between his Broke Jaw Ridge and the Hopi Tribe. A seemingly reasonable family man, it's revealed that Jeremiah is a prideful, stubborn, and willing to let all his friends and family die just to prevent himself from apologizing to Walker and surrendering. He refuses to atone for his actions, caring more for himself than the safety of anyone else.
Continuity Lockout: Since the show undergoes a significant retool to mostly revolve around Morgan and the newer characters introduced around Season 4, the back half of the show isn't too bad about this. However, the final season of the series when Madison returns as the lead does start calling back to the early seasons that will require a viewer to catch up on them.
Epileptic Trees: Basically, any new character who seems too nice is speculated to be secretly evil, and any character that is not so nice is speculated to be even more evil. Viewers have no faith in humanity when it comes to characters of this show.
Fandom Rivalry: Fans of The 100 didn't take kindly to Alycia Debnam-Carey's role on this show forcing it to kill off her character there, but only due to being oblivious that Alycia Debnam-Carey had signed a contract with Fear the Walking Dead first. Especially since her role as Lexa is more popular than her role as Alicia and the death being controversial because of the character being a lesbian. Though this ended up turning into Friendly Fandoms of sorts.
It's not exactly uncommon to find people who refuse to acknowledge anything after Season 3 as canon; strong points of contention include its poor writing and cyclical storylines, drastic tone shift, killing of Nick and (apparently) Madison, and turning Morgan into the main protagonist of the series.
To a lesser extent, Season 6. While the show is still not without its haters, there are now fans willing to accept the previous two seasons as canon while also acknowledging them as having been the show's Audience-Alienating Era and advising new viewers to simply skip over most of the episodes to get to the current season.
Alicia has a couple of canon love interests, most notably Jake, but there is next to no fanfiction, fan art, or fan edits centered around her with any of them. Instead, most fans prefer to pair her with Elyza Lex, a Recurring Fanon Character character based on Clarke from The 100. (Clarke's love interest, Lexa, was played by Alicia's actor.)
Most fans prefer to ship Nick with Troy rather than his canon girlfriend, Luciana. For example, the Nick/Troy pairing has over five times as many fanfics on Archive of Our Own than Nick/Luciana does.
Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The series (and its mothership) have a pretty hefty following in Costa Rica, and went completely bonkers because of a Costa Rican flag appearing on a scene on the pilot episode. They also like the fact that Jack's actor (Daniel Zovatto) was born in Costa Rica.
Harsher in Hindsight: Travis warning his son Chris not to trust Derek and Brandon over him and his last words cursing his son for leaving him really become this when the season 2 finale reveals that Chris was killed by his so-called friends and Travis never got to say goodbye to his son.
He's Just Hiding: Word of God reminds us that whoever hasn't explicitly died onscreen should be assumed to be alive. Madison has become this ever since her somewhat ambiguous death in Season 4, not helped by the vague responses from the showrunners and even Kim Dickens herself as to whether or not a return is in the cards. At the end of 2021, Talking Dead finally confirmed that Madison is indeed alive and she returned for the Season 7 finale and as a series regular in Season 8.
Hilarious in Hindsight: Alycia Debnam-Carey's character has the last name of "Clark". The name of her love interest in The 100—the show she had a guest role in around the time Fear the Walking Dead started filming, is named Clarke. Could be Heartwarming in Hindsight if you see it as a deliberate tribute to The 100.
It's Short, So It Sucks!: Flight 462 is a short miniseries that aired its two minute episodes infrequently in-between commercial breaks of the mainstream series, not leaving much of an impact on most fans.
Season 7 mostly taking on an anthology format with the cast split up once again after Season 6 did the same thing has rubbed some fans the wrong way. A good chunk of the cast is not even focused on and are Demoted to Extra. Even when the cast is reunited, each episode only revolves around one or two characters at a time making for sluggish plot progression at best.
Seasons 5, 6, and 7 also all end with Morgan separated from most of the main cast and them having to find each other again after a loss. While Season 8 at least doesn't use the anthology format after Seasons 6 and 7 already did it, it still depicts the group reuniting as an ongoing plot thread and only half the cast appears in the first half of the season.
It Was His Sled: Madison returning for the final season after being revealed to have survived her apparent death in Season 4 is impossible for viewers to miss out on.
Several fans of The Walking Dead expressed an interest in picking up the show after the announcement that Morgan Jones would be crossing over to join. Dwight also joining the cast in Season 5 has sparked some interest as well. Hilariously, this has been inverted by the recent seasons, as many people have openly expressed that Morgan has taken over the show and ever since then, the show's quality has declined considerably.
For many detractors of the newer seasons, some still watch the show solely because of John Dorie, which many consider the best character in the show. Needless to say when he was killed off, many weren't very happy.
Invoked in the Season 7 finale (and Season 8) with the showrunners bringing back Madison after fans have decried her death, and after many people theorized she never died in the first place.
Like You Would Really Do It: Nobody bought for a second that Alicia would die of her walker bite due to it simply not working that way going off the franchise so far. Sure enough, in "Amina" she finally recovers after a season of hallucinations and insisting she's doomed.
Love to Hate: Teddy Maddox is a total bastard of the highest order, being a psychopathic Serial Killer who wants to restart civilization by launching a series of nuclear missiles at various points across the country. However, John Glover's hammy performance, Teddy's history with John Dorie's father and the sheer scope and lunacy of his evil plan have made him quite an entertaining villain as well.
Will's death is scary at first, because Strand suddenly pushes him closer to the edge of a building after he was told that Alicia will find him. But the shock factor is ruined by the obvious Stock Scream dubbed into the scene as Will finally falls.
Seasons 6 and 7 have featured a lot of telling as opposed to showing, often to explain away a plot development offscreen. For example, in “The Painting”, after the entire episode builds up to a conflict between the group and the Stalkers, once we return from a commercial break, the conflict has been resolved offscreen; or Morgan telling Alicia they can survive in the sub for a few weeks despite not knowing how many people she has in tow.
A lot of viewers have hated the shots in Season 7 that focus on just a character’s eyes, intended to show us their faces behind their masks they’re wearing in the nuclear fallout. It comes across as a poor man’s attempt to emulate similar focus shots of Iron Man and other suit-wearing heroes, or at least some attempt to have the actors show their faces perhaps to fill some sort of screentime quota.
Charlie is not hated, but some viewers are still understandably not fully over her murdering Nick in Season 4, even if the characters have decided to forgive her for it. This is actually invoked In-Universe in Season 8 when Madison reunites with her and learns what she did.
The hot air balloon scene as well as Tom's death in Season 5 are commonly regarded as some of the show's lowest points and perfect examples of the Seasonal Rot that season suffered from.
Nightmare Fuel: First off, there's the walkers. Secondly, it only took a few weeks to kill off pretty much everything. By Season 2, which is around a week or two in after the outbreak got rolling, and they're already resorting to firebombing the entire east and west coastlines to stop the infected. And as we know, their efforts to thin them out was in vain.
Clayton, an elderly man Luci encounters in late Season 4. His actor gives a great performance and you genuinely feel bad for him and his predicament, and he is nothing but grateful and helpful to Luci and helps her move past her guilt. He gets a very heartwarming final scene where he gets the treat of a cold beer and can barely believe it himself.
Chuck, a one-shot one-scene but nonetheless highly memorable character from Season 5, Episode 10. The start of the episode has him radioing out to the survivors after he sees one of the tapes they start leaving tapes on the road for people to see and find hope from. He requests that they kill him and bury him under the stars. Morgan and Grace manage to find him before he dies, finding him on the roof, where he hoped to see the stars one last time. He can't because it's cloudy, so Grace gets a cute toy turtle projector that creates an image of stars on the nearby awning. He loves it, and offscreendies peacefully in a truly heartrending moment.
Recurring Fanon Character: Elyza Lex is the focus of a lot of the fanfiction, fanvids, and fan art for the show. However, she never actually appears in the show, and was in fact a complete creation by this fandom and that of The 100, as a stand-in for Eliza Taylor (or rather her character Clarke from The 100). Most of these are in fact shipping motivated, as Alicia's actress, Alycia Debnam-Carey, played Clarke's main love interest Lexa on The 100. So when Lexa died, a large portion of the "Clexa" shippers invented a character who they thought Taylor would play on FTWD, and from there the character just took on a life on its own.
Some people didn't like Travis for being too optimistic, too much of a pacifist, and in some cases, an idiot. But he started to win some fans over once he left Madison's group to try and help his son, which gave way to loads of Character Development for him that broke his character. After he lost his son, brutally beat his killers to death, and accepted that the world he now lives in is much more cruel than how it used to be, almost everyone immediately stopped hating him.
Virginia was initially disliked for a while due to many fans seeing her as a Negan rip-off. However, her respect of sorts for Morgan and hidden depths, especially with the reveal of Dakota being her daughter resulted in her death scene where she would be executed by June Dorie in revenge for Dakota killing John a fair amount of outrage.
Dakota was, for a while, not very well liked due to her being seen as a copy of Charlie, as well as getting Janis framed and killed and also murdering John Dorie. However, her interactions where she would be manipulated by Teddy put her in a more sympathetic light, and her death scene, where she allows herself to be killed by the nuclear warheads, resulted in her being looked upon a bit more favorably.
Martha from the fourth season became this due to her being a rather uninteresting and bland villain, some even saying she's one of the worst, if not, the worst, villain in the entire franchise. She’s an insufferable psychopath who is a transparent mouthpiece for the writers to cram in as much hammy dialogue meant to challenge Morgan’s ideology in a season already criticized for flimsy writing, and gets out of too many dangerous situations too easily. Few if any viewers saw any reason for Morgan to allow her to live or try to reason with her.
Jim from Season 4 is hated due to being an annoying prick who spends his entire time antagonizing people, being Too Dumb to Live due to being sheltered from the apocalypse, and being obsessed with beer and boasting about how good he can make it. Many fans rolled their eyes at how he was clearly intended to be the big emotional death of the season when they were ready to get rid of him.
Tom from the fifth season quickly became this despite his short time, mainly due to him being too interested in the very base-breaking camera subplot with Althea, and his death scene, where instead of deciding to escape a clearly collapsing bridge, he decides to stay and record the event.
Ali from Season 7 was poorly received for, unfortunately, what was widely regarded as a lacking performance by his actor; as well as an overly sappy rushed love story that ended predictably.
In Season 4, the ReTool and change in showrunners brought about a number of poorly received changes to the show:
The original cast is sidelined, with Nick being killed off and Madison being Put on a Bus, and the rest being reduced to supporting characters or spending long stretches Out of Focus, with the worst offender being Alicia.
A new cast is introduced, all of whom except John Dorie and Grace Mukherjee are Base Breakersat best, and a few of whom are outright Scrappies. Morgan, a Transplant from the parent series, becomes the new lead and ends up being even more divisive than he was on that show (see below). The cast continues to grow to an almost unmanageable size by the next season.
The entire tone of the show becomes Lighter and Softer. Morally complex antiheroes like Strand, Daniel, Madison, and to a lesser extent Morgan become unambiguously good people trying to do their best and make the world a better place. This contrasts heavily with the first few seasons and the original vision for the series, in which the "heroes" would get darker and darker over time and become Villain Protagonists.
Characters are heavily rewritten to accommodate this change in tone, with some, like Daniel Salazar, feeling like completely different people from one season to the next.
A number of uninteresting villains are introduced and quickly disposed of, with the worst, Season 4's Big Bad Martha, being widely considered to be the weakest villain in the entire franchise.
The plotting and dialogue become much more cliched and amateur, with the previously complex storytelling being replaced by characters making endless stupid decisions, monologuing about morality and how to be a good person, and just generally serving an often directionless plot.
Season 7 has been regarded as the worst season of the show since the retool, due to the show picking and choosing when to apply logic (some characters magically avoid radiation poisoning while others get burned), a heavy reliance on monologues once again, a season-long build up to a war that never happens, and a failure to manage every character in the cast adequately with many dying unceremonious deaths or outright vanishing with no explanation.
So Okay, It's Average: The general consensus for the show is that it's entertaining, but not exactly above the mainstream series it came from.
Opinions started to change around Season 3 or even Season 2, usually saying that the main show could learn a great deal from the sister show. Some even abandoned the main show and solely started to watch Fear instead.
Opinions started to change a third time after Season 6 fixed a lot of the mistakes audiences had with the last two seasons, and is considered at least on par with the original series in terms of quality.
In the pilot episode, when the undead Calvin reappears◊ and jumps onto the Clark's windshield in an attempt to attack them, it's obvious that the "walker" is just the same actor wearing contact lenses and nothing else. It makes the character look more like Dracula than an actual zombie. Although this could be because the undead Calvin is very fresh by this stage, and they did make him grotesquely banged-up when he gets run over twice.
The second-season premiere suffers from some dodgy green-screen (most notably in the shot where Strand tells Nick to hook up the bowline on the Zodiac) and the poor compositing when it segues from Madison, Alicia and Daniel staring out as jets firebomb Los Angeles.
Seasons 6 and 7 also begin to show the strains of production during the COVID-19 pandemic, due to some visible uses of green screen and scenes where the actors who portray the characters in a scene were clearly not all on the same set.
Strawman Has a Point: While Strand may come across as a Jerkass towards the others for controlling the group, he is one of the few characters to fully accept that Humans Are the Real Monsters in the new world and frequently points out how stupid it is for the others to easily trust other people they know nothing about.
They Changed It, So It Sucks: The show switching to Scott Gimple as its showrunner starting in Season 4. Gimple has been decried for his repetitively edgy and hopeless direction on the main show, and popular (or at least vocal) fan opinion is that he's made Fear the Walking Dead completely unrecognizable and a clone of what he's done to the main show. Especially since the original showrunner said that the original plan was to continue the story for around seven seasons and have the main cast turn into Villain Protagonists.
Madison's unceremonious death fakeout is by far the most controversial moment of the series as the fandom considered it a waste of the show's lead character, and unquestionably led to Morgan being regarded as a Replacement Scrappy once he took over the show. She was later brought back specifically because of the criticism of the decision to kill her off.
Another founding cast member, Alicia, is kept out of most of their final season and when she does return, it's with an arc most people found to be idiotic and also a retread of tropes the showrunners have been overindulging in such as hallucinations. Then Alicia gets Put on a Bus until she comes back in the final episode, and while she does get a happy ending by reuniting with her mother, many consider it to be not enough to fully salvage her character arc.
Wes did not get much development as a character, so his Face–Heel Turn seemed shallow and random to viewers, while the supposed reasons for it seemed hypocritical, as Strand was also deceitful with his group's members, and with less good reason for it than Lucia's reason for deceiving Daniel. His Face–Heel Turn also ends up pointless since Strand kills him later on.
Interviews and promos for the show suggested that the premise of the show was about being able to see society's gradual collapse during the first days of the Zombie Apocalypse that set The Walking Dead into motion. However, by the third episode of the series, the power goes out and leaves L.A. in pitch-black darkness. Episode 4 starts after a nine day Time Skip in which Los Angeles outside the safe zones is effectively a ghost town populated only by the infected. By the beginning of Season 2, L.A. is wiped off the map completely via a combination of wildfires and the remnants of Operation Cobalt, rendering it completely unusable as a locale from that point forward.
In Season 2, Flight 462 was supposed to tie into the main characters' storyline, to the point where Michelle Ang (who played Alex) was billed as being part of the main cast. However, with the exception of two episodes, neither the plane crash, nor Alex, impact the plot whatsoever short of introducing a few minor characters and a minor subplot that's quickly glossed over. Even Alex ended up as an Advertised Extra,and we've no idea what happened to her. Allegedly the actress became pregnant, causing the arc to get cut short.
The end of Season 2 suggested that Travis had finally embraced his dark side, via brutally killing Derek and Brandon after learning that they murdered his son. Season 3 once again plays into this, via having Travis take out a group of walkers by himself... until the opening of the following episode, where he is shot and mortally wounded, throwing himself out of a helicopter to his death even before the opening credits roll. While there was a legitimate reason for this (Cliff Curtis left the show to take a job offer with the Avatar sequels), many bemoaned how pointless Travis' story arc was.
Season 4 has been criticized for being essentially taking every development and dumping it in the trash for the sake of introducing Morgan, new characters, and taking on an identical tone to the main series. It starts with a two year Time Skip with no explanation as to how the original cast got to where they were, before Nick is killed later and Madison is Put on a Bus.
The second half of Season 4 introduced a tantalizing new element to the Walking Dead universe: a serial killer. Though the show has had a few psychopaths, a serial killer preying on unwitting victims, in a similar style to Jack the Ripper, would be a new angle on the dangers that people face where civilized laws no longer apply. Unfortunately, the serial killer they developed was revealed to be yet another poor damaged soul, and the show has trod that ground many times before.
Season 7 devotes its entire run to building up a war between Morgan's group and Strand's Tower, but the Tower ends up destroyed thanks to a squabble between Alicia and Strand without any sort of conflict ever taking place. Strand’s turn as a villain ends up going nowhere since his community falls thanks to the dispute, with the other characters accepting him back offscreen when Alicia insists he rejoin them.
Unintentionally Sympathetic: Andrew Adams, who was nothing but friendly towards the main protagonists, gets brutally tortured by Daniel out of bitterness at his wife and some other people taken away for shady reasons, so it's a little hard to take him as the bad guy when he comes back for revenge on Daniel. While he knew of the military's plan to massacre the civilians and didn't warn them about it, neither the characters nor the audience learn this information until it gets literally tortured out of him.
A lot of people find Madison, Travis, and Daniel's treatment of Strand to be quite unjustified. As Ambiguously Evil as he may be, Strand did save them all and give them shelter and a place on his boat. Their threats to throw him overboard and their constant attempts to bring complete strangers onto his boat (especially when one such event completely proves him right) has rubbed a lot of audience members the wrong way.
Martha, who was set as the Big Bad of the show in the second half of the fourth season. Her Badass Decay arrived quickly, and viewers thought she was so far gone that there was no benefit in keeping her alive for anyone, even for her own sake. Morgan as well, for his relentless attempts to save her, even though she was threatening to kill him and his friends, to the point where one might wonder if he was doing so more for her or to prove a point to himself.
Both Strand and Alicia get this in Season 7’s “Divine Providence”. Despite having seemingly rekindled their friendship and the closest they can get to adopted family, Alicia decides Strand cannot be trusted when he is forced to kill Wes, believing she was succeeding in talking him down and that Strand’s pragmatic decision was wrong. Later, Strand has the chance to turn off the beacon to buy the group time to take shelter, but he decides to stop and monologue about how he fears Alicia will never forgive him. All this results in a scuffle that leads to the destruction of the Tower, the location that had been the driving focus of the entire season.
◊ and jumps onto the Clark's windshield in an attempt to attack them, it's obvious that the "walker" is just the same actor wearing contact lenses and nothing else. It makes the character look more like Dracula than an actual zombie. Although this could be because the undead Calvin is very fresh by this stage, and they did make him grotesquely banged-up when he gets run over twice.
