Warning: spoilers ahead for Fear The Walking Dead season 8, episode 2.
Rick Grimes and his friends spent years pondering if The Walking Dead's zombie virus had a solution, now there are two potential cures confirmed to exist in the franchise. As a general rule, The Walking Dead refrained from dissecting the science behind the zombie virus during its 11 seasons, revealing only that the entire population had already been infected, bites were fatal, and reanimation would occur regardless of the deceased's cause of death. The closest The Walking Dead ever came to a solution was hastily amputating bitten body parts, but not only was this technique deeply unreliable, limb removal was far from an ideal cure.
A more permanent answer to the zombie virus presented itself in The Walking Dead: World Beyond season 2. Led by Hope Bennett, a team of Civic Republic scientists found success devising a strain of fungi that could accelerate a zombie's rate of decay so that the dead would no longer be a threat. While not a cure for the actual virus, this fungi could solve the zombie outbreak as a whole, and the Walking Dead: World Beyond ending showed Hope's scientists working in secret, away from Civic Republic eyes, making breakthroughs on their mushroom miracle. According to Fear The Walking Dead season 8, however, there is another cure.
Radiation Could Be A Zombie Cure In The Walking Dead
Fear The Walking Dead went nuclear in season 5, with the main group of survivors crashing into a heavily radiated area, before season 6 ended with the villainous Teddy setting off a nuke in Texas. Based on her observations during the fallout, Fear The Walking Dead's June speculated that radiation could save someone from a zombie bite, and has spent the best part of a seven-year time skip working with PADRE to prove this hypothesis. The key line comes in Fear The Walking Dead season 8, episode 2, in which June discusses a bitten patient, admitting, "It stopped the infection, but the amount of radiation that it took just made things worse for her."
With this, Fear The Walking Dead essentially confirms radiation can indeed be used to prevent zombie bites being fatal. Such a revelation is a game-changer for The Walking Dead, since the process can be performed regardless of the bite's location on the body, and does not need to be administered seconds after the bite occurs, solving the two biggest problems of The Walking Dead's amputation trick. The not-inconsiderable drawback of this technique is that the amount of radiation required to cure a zombie bite is lethal in itself, so the subject dies anyway. As side effects go, this is difficult to overlook.
The Walking Dead's Cures Can Set Up The Franchise's Ending
Fear The Walking Dead's zombie virus cure may be just as lethal as the affliction it treats, but June's radiation discovery is still extremely promising. Prior to the zombie apocalypse, June was an ICU nurse, so while her medical knowledge is undoubtedly strong, her expertise does not lie in experimental treatments for infectious diseases. Were more specialized doctors to study June's early findings, it seems plausible that, with more research, radiation therapy could become a viable treatment for zombie bites in The Walking Dead's universe - just as fungi could eventually become a solution for the hordes of undead scouring the planet.
Between these two zombie virus cures, a potential ending for AMC's The Walking Dead franchise comes into view. With the Bennett family's fungi solution making light work of zombies and June's radiation treating bites from the undead, a brighter future looks distinctly possible. The only problem left to cure would be the initial virus burrowed into the world's population. With Daryl Dixon heading to France, the origin point of the outbreak, in his The Walking Dead spinoff, even that problem no longer seems insurmountable.
Fear The Walking Dead Season 8's Bite Twists Sets Up June Finding A Cure
Fear The Walking Dead season 8, episode 2 features a brutal and shocking twist when Dwight and Sherry's young son is bitten by a zombie at PADRE's behest. PADRE's intention is to motivate June into getting her radiation treatment working, and although the actual chomp happens offscreen, a child getting bitten is deeply shocking - even for The Walking Dead. While children have perished in the franchise before, Carl Grimes and Lizzie being the most notable examples, it would be a cruel surprise if Fear The Walking Dead forced Dwight and Sherry's son to undergo a slow and painful death via zombie bite.
Since Finch dying in Fear The Walking Dead season 8 seems unlikely, his bite might provide an early hint that June will be successful, and eventually find a way to save the young boy from what has previously been a fatal injury in franchise history. Given that Fear The Walking Dead has now more or less caught up to The Walking Dead's ending, it is also possible that Morgan relays June's findings back to Alexandria, and thanks to the resources of the Commonwealth, radiation cures could quickly become commonplace. All of June's hard work will prove meaningless, however, if she cannot wriggle free from PADRE's control first.
Fear The Walking Dead continues Sunday on AMC.