Warning: Contains SPOILERS for Fear the Walking Dead season 7, episode 1.
As expected, Fear the Walking Dead jumped ahead in time in the season 7 premiere after season 6. In the season 6 finale, the launching of 10 nuclear warheads kicked off a different kind of apocalypse for the AMC series. Now, the main characters are living in a place that’s not only infested with zombies, but also plagued by fallout, radiation, and irradiated zombies.
Similar to the approach taken by previous seasons of Fear the Walking Dead, the new season began its story with a time skip. So rather than showing what happened to Morgan (Lennie James) and all the others in the immediate aftermath of the detonations, the series is the process of exploring the states of their lives at a point where Fear the Walking Dead’s nuclear apocalypse is already in full-swing. Fear the Walking Dead season 7 opened with a Strand-centric story that revealed quite a lot has transpired since the events of the season 6 finale. Strand (Colman Domingo) is now running a new community, and Alicia (Alycia Debnam-Carey) is no longer locked inside Teddy’s secret bunker.
While everything that happened with Strand and Alicia suggests that a great deal of time has passed, a clear timeline is never laid out. However, Fear the Walking Dead season 7 episode 1, title “The Beacon,” did drop a big hint. According to Will (Gus Halper), he’s been outside and on his own for 50 days, which means that at least that much time has gone by since the nukes were dropped. But it was likely a bit longer than that, especially since Alicia had enough time to get to know Will and establish herself as leader before his exile from the group. This is indicative of a time skip of at least two or three months.
While some have wondered if the development of Strand’s community means that a year or more has gone by, the showrunners have repeatedly confirmed that only “months” have passed between Fear the Walking Dead season 6's ending and the beginning of season 7, which means that the show’s time jump wasn’t too significant. That being said, it’s long enough for many changes to have taken place in the main characters’ lives.
Over the course of the next few episodes, Fear the Walking Dead season 7 has several questions to answer about what Morgan’s group has been up to since season 6 ended. Chief among them relates to the fate of Alicia, which could turn into one of the season’s biggest mysteries. Since she’s apparently had an eventful experience over the last few months, a future episode is likely to use flashbacks to catch up viewers. There’s also the matter of the people that Isabelle (Sydney Lemmon) took with her in the CRM helicopter. Depending on where she brought them, they could be living with a new settlement. Regardless, Fear the Walking Dead still has plenty of territory to cover in the episodes to come as it continues to fill in the blanks on how Morgan and all his friends have endured the nuclear apocalypse.