RELATED: 'Fear The Walking Dead' Season 8 Trailer Reveals a Massive Time Jump As they try to figure out how to take care of young Mo, now played by Zoey Merchant, we get our bearings about how this world has changed once more. There is a jarring jump in time, something this and the main series have come to rely on as a way to basically hit a reset button, though you’re willing to go along with it. It is when he is alongside Madison, played by a returning Kim Dickens, in the first episode that things are at their most engaging. From the moment when he first met Rick ( Andrew Lincoln) in the early days of the end of the world, his emotional strife set the tone of what was to come and, at the very least, there still remains something promising in accompanying him on the road ahead. Morgan, played by the always compelling Lennie James, has been a part of this story since the very beginning and is still one of the more dynamic figures around which to build this final season. The key to its promise is that Fear the Walking Dead has refreshingly kept the characters central whereas the original buried them under more plot just to keep something happening. Whether that will actually last is the question. Though its more grounded first season still remains its best and feels like a distant memory in the same way that the original’s does, there remains something worth holding out hope for here. Where the biggest problem of the main series came in how little it felt like any of these people we'd come to know had any depth or capacity to change, this offshoot has managed to mostly stand apart. While there is a brewing conflict that is likely to pit the surviving characters against both a new enemy in the mysterious PADRE and possibly even each other, there is also a more focused element of exploration of the characters themselves. In the first three episodes of the eighth and final season of Fear the Walking Dead, the prequel series of sorts that is now seemingly almost adjacent to the timeline of the main story, there is a sense of creative freedom that has only been felt sporadically in this expanding world as of late. Though it was not all that long ago that the final season of the original series of The Walking Dead shambled to a close while leaving open the door for many more shows to come, there is one more apocalyptic narrative to tie up before then. The beginning of the end is upon us once again.

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