Yahoo News The Walking Dead and Fear TWD's timelines explained
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 two-year period.
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.
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 letting 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 (day 321 - 324), to getting locked up by a pacifist (day 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, which compared Rick on day 0 of the outbreak to day 632 (just after Rick's captured by Jadis).
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, but they still haven't gone 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).
Here's hoping new-Judith Cailey Fleming doesn't have any Chandler Riggs-style growth spurts between now and season 18, as we imagine the show's going to slow its timeline back down again from this point on.
Though we hope that they actually take this opportunity to speed things up a bit, especially as, with season nine taking place in Year Eight, we've almost caught up with what this show should have logically been doing from the start (guys: one year / one season – it's not rocket science).
Want up-to-the-minute entertainment news and features? Just hit 'Like' on our Digital Spy Facebook page and 'Follow' on our @digitalspy Twitter account and you're all set.
('You Might Also Like',)
