Be warned: spoilers for all seasons of The Walking Dead, the episodes of Fear the Walking Dead, and the comics through current continuity follow.
Two weeks into the new spin-off, Fear the Walking Dead, a familiar refrain can be heard: the show is killing off all its Black male characters, a complaint voiced many times about the primary property, The Walking Dead, with its well-known habit of not only killing off Black male characters, but killing off Black male characters as soon as another Black man shows up. With the fifth season, we began to see some change in that pattern, but now with the spin-off, a different pattern has emerged: the show seems to be killing off all the Black male characters (and while one is currently only in the process of dying, so far as we can confirm, there was a hint near the end of the second episode that the character in question, Matt, may have died offscreen).
Thus far, Fear the Walking Dead has presented a diverse cast reflective of its Los Angeles setting. But of the four significant deaths/zombies in the two episodes, three have been Black men:
- Gloria, Nick’s possible paramour and the first zombie we see
- Calvin, Nick’s drug dealer
- Art Costa, principal at the high school where Madison and Travis work (and which the younger characters attend)
- Matt, Alicia’s boyfriend, bitten and dying
There have been other background deaths and undead, unnamed characters or people seen in passing, like the Clarks’ neighbors, like the homeless man whose death set off a protest, but these four are particularly important, plot-wise… and three of them have not only been Black men, but also the only significant Black characters on the show in these first two episodes.
It’s early yet in the new show, and the full cast listing seems to indicate we’ll see more Black men, with at least one in a significant role, and while I’m willing to give the show a chance in this regard, the sacrifice of Black men has felt like a problem across different presentations of the material. At the current point in the comic series, which is several years ahead of the show (and its different storylines), there are only a handful of surviving Black male characters — perhaps four — and most of those have been in the background for some time, and in The Walking Dead, the last season saw the loss of most significant Black male characters, leaving us with only Gabriel and the newly returned Morgan. From season six previews, show-Morgan seems to be playing a rather different role than book-Morgan, who succumbs to either infection or blood loss (it’s unclear).
But these are perceptions. In order to track the show’s movesI did some counting, just to see if the numbers panned out in The Walking Dead (show).
- The Walking Dead has killed off approximately 90 people (not including fully background characters), and 17% of them were Black men.
- This number stays approximately the same when we look at significant characters — calculated by me as characters appearing in at least two episodes, or having had a conversation with a main character. Of those 75, 14 were Black men, or 18.6%.
- Wikipedia lists 27 actors as having been credited as main cast or “also starring,” and of those 27, four are Black men: Tyreese, Morgan, Gabriel, and Bob. Two of those four are dead, or 50%.
- Of those 27 actors, one is a Latina, one is an Asian-American male, two are Black women, seven are white women, and twelve are white men. Three of the white women are dead, or 42.8%, and six of the white men are dead, or also 50%. All the Black women are alive, and the other nonwhite characters as well.
So, percentage-wise, these numbers are somewhat equal: approximately half the characters in each racial/gender group die. It also seems prudent to consider, however, that since the show is set in Georgia, where African-Americans make up some 30-35% of the population, here Black characters are only 22% of the main/”also starring” cast (characters like T-Dog and Noah were not included in this). It may then be that the real issue is there aren’t enough Black characters in the show, and especially not enough Black men at one time, for audiences who are looking at race to perceive anything but a cycling of Black men in seasons 1-4. And that’s why these moves in Fear the Walking Dead are significant, because we are already watching for it.
The upcoming Telltale mini-series centered on Michonne, too, will also give us at least two more Black male deaths, if not more, in the forms of her boyfriend and his friend. Since the Telltale Games exist in comic canon rather than in television, we may get Michonne’s daughters instead of a single son, though in comic lore they were not seen at all during and after the apocalypse. As Michonne is one of my favorite characters across the different versions of story, I’m greatly anticipating the presentation of her story, even when I know it will add to a body count that feels so significant already (the previous Telltale Games versions have their own weighty body counts, after all).
That leads us, finally, to why the bodies feel so significant. Much as we’ve argued in the past with Game of Thrones and women, the death of Black men in The Walking Dead’s properties can often feel like a tool, particularly during those earlier episodes, when the arrival of a new Black man would signify the death of an older character. But unlike the very literal sacrifice of women in Game of Thrones to develop men, nearly all the deaths in The Walking Dead seem to happen to evolve some aspect of story. I say nearly here because sometimes all that seems to be evolving is everything is terrible forever, but even that is an important aspect of that post-apocalyptic world and its eternal question of “just how bad can everything get?” If I’m to offer criticism of deaths in the main show, I might say that I find it frustrating that characters who show moral and ethical streaks suddenly die (if they’re not named Rick, anyhow), a move that reduces inter- and intra-group tension, but also something the season six trailer indicates may be addressed soon.
So what purpose do the deaths in Fear the Walking Dead serve? They are all very much plot devices; the only one that promises lasting impact is Matt, because while I’m sure Madison is rattled by having to kill her boss and friend, she has other things to worry about and little room for that angst, whereas Alicia is more likely to agonize over the loss of her boyfriend and her role in abandoning him. But they can all be reduced to narrative moves: Calvin is going to shoot Nick and instead gets shot, so we can see early that bites aren’t the only way to spread infection. Art must be killed so Madison can face the horror of developing apocalypse and get down to business. Matt must die so that Alicia can feel terrible.
The fate of the homeless man and the protest that follows must also be addressed, I think, because it felt weighty in a fiction ripped-from-the-headlines sort of way (a move that, to my thought, fell flat). People don’t know what they’re seeing when the LAPD shoots a homeless man (Black, almost certainly a zombie), so they begin protesting (some outlets are calling this scene a “riot,” which is perhaps the most direct link to real-world events possible; while events devolve into violence, that comes only after more zombies show up, which I think is damned reasonable). I think this is supposed to feel familiar, reminiscent of what we’ve seen around the country in the past year in particular, but it feels too blatant. And what is the takeaway here, anyway? That protestors demonstrating over Black deaths don’t know what the hell they’re talking about? Vanity Fair (one of the outlets using the word “riot”) quoted a Hollywood Reporter interview with showrunner Dave Erickson in which he says things are still developing in terms of deaths and racial breakdowns, and we aren’t to take the shooting/protest as a critique of anything (though it seems impossible not to). He also says:
When you’re dealing with a show where you have a cast that is as diverse as ours is, it’s inevitable that characters of color are going to get bit and are going to turn or die. If you look at the larger scope of this season, what people will see is that there is parity. We want to tell the story in the best way we can and want the best actors to play those parts. It would have been a mistake to go with Anglo actors for those particular roles because I don’t think that’s honest to the world of the show.
And here’s where I think his phrasing veers into troubling territory. First, why did these particular characters have to be Black men, but not others? Yes, diversity is honest to the world of the show, but that can be achieved in a variety of ways. What about the principal demands that he be Black? I’m not sure. But the other remark, this idea that people of color will fall victim… of course they will. No one (that I’ve seen) is ever arguing that all people of color should be safe in the apocalypse, and saying as much is so extraordinarily obvious as to be a truism. The issue isn’t that this race or that is “safe,” is about what those characters, and those deaths, mean, and the weight they bring to the story. So far, that’s puzzlingly little when we consider the death count of Black men so far with this show.
