‘Fear the Walking Dead’ Teased a Whole Lot More About the Helicopter People

There’s a lot going on this season on Fear the Walking Dead. So much so that they introduced a major antagonist in the form of Matt Frewer’s evil trucker Logan in the season premiere, and haven’t even come back to him since. Instead, they’ve been dealing with Red Rover walkers (zombie tied together by their intestines), a group of rogue children, random storms, irradiated zombies, and the disappearance of Althea (Maggie Grace).

It’s that last mystery which finally gets resolved on this week’s episode, “The End of Everything,” with another heartfelt, human hour with a surprise twist that also managed to reveal a lot more about the helicopter people – the mysterious group that’s appeared on both Fear the Walking Dead and The Walking Dead.

Spoilers for Fear the Walking Dead‘s “The End of Everything” past this point.

Back on The Walking Dead, we learned that Jadis (Polyanna McIntosh) was working with a group that seemed to be recruiting people, or mining them for resources; splitting post-apocalypse survivors into “A”s and “B”s and so-forth. Midway through the ninth season of Walking Dead, they took a nearly catatonic Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) away in a helicopter with a distinctive three ring symbol, and he was never seen again (well, until we see him again).

In this season’s premiere of Fear the Walking Dead, Althea was investigating a strange walker covered in body armor and a pitch black mask, who turned out to have some even stranger documents on him (or her). The documents looked like maps, and had the same three ring symbol as on the helicopter on TWD. They seemingly took Althea, leading the rest of the group to desperately search for the former reporter. Later on, we not only saw those armored men again, but in the last episode saw what looked like the same exact helicopter from TWD.

This week’s episode looped back to that premiere to show what happened to Althea, and reveal at least one of the helicopter people’s identity. That would be Isabelle, played by relative newcomer Sydney Lemmon. If that last name sound familiar? It’s because yes, she is in fact the granddaughter of iconic actor Jack Lemmon, and the daughter of Chris Lemmon. She’s not as of yet quite as prolific as her patriarchal relatives, but that’s okay because the youngest Lemmon made a big impact on this week’s Fear.

Over the course of the episode, Isabelle is loathe to reveal anything about herself or her organization, but draws a clear line between their way of life, and Althea’s. While Al is dedicated to documenting the past, Isabelle insists the helicopter people are about the future. They believe they can repair the world through force and order, seemingly have the resources and numbers to do it (“This is bigger than me,” Isabelle says at one point. “It’s bigger than you, it’s bigger than all of us.”), and are doing it all in secret. The world is going to come back, and it seems like that’s when they’ll plan on stepping out into the light.

By episode’s end, after doing a little rock climbing and bonding over beers (RIP, Jimmy) on a helicopter landing pad, Isabelle is extremely conflicted about her feelings towards Al. She burns a tape Al made of the three ring symbol while the latter watches, clearly pained. And then when Al submits to her impending death so Isabelle can destroy all knowledge of what transpired, instead Isabelle relents, telling Al she’s the prettiest thing she’s ever seen (a callback to Al telling Isabelle on their pseudo-date that “everything is so ugly these days”) and giving her an incredibly romantic kiss.

Later, Isabelle lies to her people, telling them everything is in order. And Al tells Morgan (Lennie James) a lie about what happened to her, mentioning nothing about her encounter with Isabelle. As always with lies on TV shows, they’re going to come out later. But the important thing (beyond adding a new LGBTQ+ couple to the Walking Dead canon right on the last day of Pride Month) is that we now know quite a bit more about the helicopter people.

Granted it’s not a lot more, but it’s more than “they have a helicopter” which was the previous span of our knowledge. We do know that their organization is large, equipped and motivated. That’s significantly different from every group we’ve ever encountered in the Walking Dead franchise, which usually hovers somewhere between Fury Road and The Hills Have Eyes in terms of how a community operates. Even when a group does have resources like Woodbury on Walking Dead or the Otto ranch from Fear Season 3, there’s still a sense of limited resources, and the apple is always rotten in the core.

The helicopter people are different. Just based on Isabelle, they seem like regimented fanatics willing to wage war and eliminate anyone in order to make the future they see coming happen. That’s… Pretty bad, and certainly a big enough threat to bring together the two shows in a very big way.

It also is at least a little bit different from The Commonwealth, the group from the “Walking Dead” comics that is similarly large and motivated. That’s been the popular theory for who is behind the helicopters, and it’s still possible that the Ohio based society could be the franchise’s next major antagonists. Certainly the shows have had no problem with tweaking and remixing creator Robert Kirkman’s comics with ease. But The Commonwealth is much more a meritocracy based on capitalism — they reward their citizens with the same positions and levels of wealth they had pre-apocalypse in their current society — than the fascistic military Isabelle represents. It’s also the diametric opposite, when you drill into it: The Commonwealth is focused on recapturing the past, while the helicopter people are about the future.

Regardless of what the name of Isabelle’s group is, or where they’re based, a major change is promised for Fear when we hit the half-season point. And with San Diego Comic-Con approaching, it’s almost guaranteed that some big announcements are imminent. In the meantime, I’ll just be over here shipping hashtag IsabAl.

Fear the Walking Dead airs Sundays at 9/8c on AMC.

Where to stream Fear the Walking Dead