Last year, Fear the Walking Dead introduced Lennie James as Morgan, who came over from The Walking Dead.
He appeared in a handful of episodes in the early seasons of the original show before becoming a regular, only to leave at the conclusion of the All Out War storyline because he’d grown tired of war and Crazy Rick.
Season 4 of Fear saw Morgan finding the survivors from the first three seasons of that show before joining them.
We’ve known for some time that another Walking Dead crossover was coming soon, but in the first episode of Season 5, Here to Help, a Walking Dead crossover occurred that many fans picked up on right away.
At the end of the episode, Althea (Maggie Grace) returned to the airplane crash site to examine the walker in the black Judge Dredd-type suit who attacked her.
While searching the body she discovered a pouch which contained a map and plastic inserts — and a link back to The Walking Dead and one of the more annoying groups that appeared in the series, Jadis/Anne and her Trash Heap Kids.
The Scavengers, led by Jadis/Anne (Pollyanna McIntosh) were a group of — well, they were a group. And they were annoying. And they apparently played both sides because they were just in this for themselves.
But the one thing they did seem to have — or at least Anne had access to — was a helicopter that came around every so often. And it looked a bit like this:
Here’s a better look at it, so one can see the logo on the back:
This was the same helicopter that spirited Rick and Anne away after he blew up the bridge that eventually led to the separation of the communities.
Now, this logo was seen on the map along with the acronym CRM:
Without getting into any detail on what CRM may mean, the logo is identical to the one on the helicopter, which means yeah, here’s another connection between Texas, Alexandria, and eventually Anne and Rick Grimes.
There are also a lot of plastic inserts which, I believe, are used to overlay a map.
I thought they may be county lines in Texas and did a little searching, but couldn’t see anything that matched with this. But there was one in particular that bothered me, and it’s this one:
It bothered me because it looks so familiar. And it hit me: I have seen this outline before. While this is only a theory on my part, I believe this is also a big tieback to The Walking Dead.
Because I believe Insert K is an overlay for the City of Baltimore.
Now, the outline isn’t exact, but so what? Maybe it’s not supposed to be. Maybe this is just Fear throwing us a strange bone to chew on. But this idea does make sense, and since I live only 90 minutes north of this area and have visited it many times in the past, so I know what’s in the area.
Like a major airport, the Aberdeen Proving Ground, a US Army testing area about 30 minutes to the northeast, the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, which does a lot of research for the DoD and NASA, and Fort Meade about 20 minutes to the south.
That last is also important because that’s the location of the National Security Agency, aka the NSA, and if there’s one place that might survive the zombie apocalypse, it’s that place.
All of which is located about 90 minutes to the northeast of the communities of Alexandria, Hilltop, and The Kingdom, meaning it’s a short helicopter flight away, but a not so short trip by horse or foot.
Like it or not we now have proof that the group that stayed in contact with Anne and took Rick is in Texas. Two questions remain:
Are these people part of the mythical Commonwealth from the comics?
And while I don’t believe we’ll see Rick, is it possible we’ll eventually see Heath or Anne turn up?
Stay tuned…