‘Fear the Walking Dead’ Showrunners Break Down the Worst New Baby Experience Ever

Raising a new child is hard enough, but imagine if you were doing it in the middle of a zombie apocalypse and a nuclear apocalypse? In an abandoned submarine? With no food? And at least one of the parents maybe wanted to die?

That’s exactly the experience (weird coincidence there) Morgan (Lennie James) and Grace (Karen David) are dealing with in Fear the Walking Dead‘s latest episode, titled “Six Hours”. Spoilers past this point, but in the hour the duo has to somehow calm down the screaming Baby Mo, while also scrounging for food and surviving the double apocalypse.

“The teaser of that episode was designed to really encapsulate that feeling where you are with a child, you have no idea how to kind of give anything it needs and your with someone who should be your partner who you love yet at the same time you just are at each other throats because you’re sleep deprived,” co-showrunner Andrew Chambliss told Decider.

That said, there’s a deeper stress at play here… Last season, Grace lost her own child in an emotionally gut-wrenching episode, leading to a mutual decision between her and Morgan to kill themselves before the warheads hit. Instead, they found Baby Mo, and decide to raise the child together. Still, when we pick up, Grace is grappling with the idea that this is not her child, and not the life she pictured living; or any life at all, really.

“On a more serious level, it was about speaking to the truth of Grace’s experience and her grief and that fact that she has, at that point in the story, really not processed the loss that she had last season,” Chambliss continued. “And really demonstrate that she and Morgan are on two very different pages on how they view baby Mo, and their relationship to her.”

As the episode continues, Morgan provides a little bit of hope, as usual, thanks to a radiation proof vehicle he’s hoping to drive to safety beyond the nuclear fallout. Instead, they encounter two irradiated survivors named Fred and Bea. The duo immediately steal Mo, saying the baby is their own. It’s not, of course; their baby died, and they keep it in a duffel bag in the back of their car, in the episode’s most terrifying moment. But simultaneous to that reveal is Fred almost suffocating Baby Mo rather than let her get eaten by zombies. Don’t worry, though, killing Mo was never really an option.

“We approached these episodes talking about character alphas and omegas,” co-showrunner Ian Goldberg said, “how a character changes from the beginning of the episode to the end. And for us one of the crucial aspects of this episode and what it was about emotionally is Grace at the beginning, feeling so isolated and disconnected from this child that she wouldn’t even sing to the baby.

“Even though we know that Grace can sing, we know that’s something that’s important to her, but she would not do that to this baby because of all of the pain and suffering associated with the loss of her own child, Athena, in Season 6. And we knew that by the end of the episode, based on the journey that she went on, that she would sing to the baby, and that would be the symbol of acceptance and connection with this baby.

“So the baby was always going to survive because we did want it to end in a place of hope and actually bringing the family unit of Morgan, Grace and the baby closer together even amidst a world that is pretty dire.”

Fear the Walking Dead airs Sundays at 9/8c on AMC, and streams a week early on AMC+.

Where to watch Fear the Walking Dead