"The Walking Dead" producer AMC is making a 30-minute stand-alone episode that will feature a zombie attack on a passenger plane. The story is set right before the apocalypse happened.
According to an exclusive report of Entertainment Weekly, the special will tell the story of a group of passengers who are suddenly attacked by walkers while onboard an airplane. There will be only one survivor from this catastrophe and the character will be introduced in the second season of "Fear the Walking Dead."
It is not the first time that AMC has made a stand-alone feature from "The Walking Dead" series but the introduction of a new character using a separate episode will be a groundbreaking one for the series. The full zombies on a plane story will be launched online, but on television, it will be aired mid-show of "The Walking Dead."
In a related post about "The Walking Dead" stand-alone feature, Business Insider explains how the "Fear the Walking Dead" is vastly different from the original series. First, the location of the new title is in East LA rather than Atlanta. And instead of calling zombies "walkers," the people call them "the infected." Then there is the time frame of the events leading to the zombie apocalypse. It shows the missing days and weeks during which "The Walking Dead" protagonist Rick Grimes was in a coma.
Another big difference is how the characters behave. Rick and his crew are all hardened survivors while the cast of "Fear the Walking Dead" are all average folks who struggle with life until they are caught in the middle of a zombie outbreak.
Finally, there is a great variance in the appearance of zombies between the two titles. In the original series, the walkers look gruesome and bordering on being mutilated while in the stand-alone special, the zombies look more human and less decomposed. Greg Nicotero, special effects artist for "Fear the Walking Dead" explains, "In an effort for this outbreak to sweep across society so quickly, you have to have situations where someone's not gonna look at a walker in the middle of the street and immediately recognize that that person's dangerous."
"The Walking Dead" returns on TV on Oct.11.
