Mexico stars as 'Fear the Walking Dead' returns

Land, ho. Zombies? Oh, no.

After a half-season spent largely at sea, AMC’s Fear the Walking Dead resumes Season 2 Sunday (9 ET/PT) on dry land, but in an increasingly shaky world.

Mexico, where the drama was filmed this season, offers a variety of intriguing geographic settings, from a Pacific Ocean resort to hot, rugged desert to the city of Tijuana, a reminder of the urban Los Angeles setting from the show's beginning.

After a three-month hiatus, the show will visit multiple environs in the season's final eight episodes, as the extended family of Madison Clark (Kim Dickens) and Travis Manawa (Cliff Curtis), connected by blood and circumstance, is separated for the first time.

"Mexico offered so much to us. There's so much beautiful tradition; there's the landscape; there's the ocean, the cities, the sprawling, vast desert areas," Dickens says. Now, the characters are "refugees in another country and that country offers all of its magic to the show."

The characters' arrival in Mexico, which happened in a recent episode, also offers Fear — the companion series to AMC's super-hit, The Walking Dead  — a different feel, with a language barrier for some characters and new characters who see the flesh-eating zombies, or infected, as something other than monsters to be destroyed.

"In the States, there's a certain remove. There's more fear of death," executive producer Dave Erickson says. "In many other parts of the world, there is a sense that the dead are never really gone, that they're always present and that we should embrace them and not distance ourselves."

As Fear resumes, the family division finds Madison's son, Nick (Frank Dillane), wandering the desert on a solo spiritual quest of sorts before finding a Tijuana survivor community with unorthodox traditions; Madison, daughter Alicia (Alycia Debnam-Carey) and adoptive comrades Ofelia (Mercedes Mason) and Strand (Colman Domingo) taking refuge in a luxury oceanfront hotel that may be inhabited; and Travis hitting the road to try to stop his teenage son, Chris (Lorenzo James Henrie), from turning further toward darkness.

The younger characters undergo coming-of-age evolutions, with Nick, now feeling invincible, at the center of Sunday's episode. He meets pharmacist Alejandro (Paul Calderon) and Luciana (Danay Garcia), leaders of a survivor community "with very strong spiritual auspices," Erickson says.

For a cast that had been working together for more than a season, it was difficult to be separated, Dickens says, but it works for the characters and the show, which averaged 7.8 million viewers during the first part of Season 2.

"We're split apart and that challenges our group, but story-wise, it allows us to delve into the characters in more detail and watch them evolve after the apocalypse," she says.

It's not just the younger characters who are changing. In a recent episode, Madison, who has formed a bond with Strand, showed a protective but merciless streak when she locked the dangerous, deluded leader of a survivor compound in a cell with the carnivorous zombies.

"When I read it, my first reaction was: How is the audience going to react, that Madison is now a cold-blooded killer of the living? But I thought this is the evolution of the character. She finds this person a danger to her son," says Dickens, explaining that such a threat goes to the character's core. Madison's "main goal has been to keep her family safe and that has been stripped from her. She doesn't lose hope that (family members) will find each other again, but she's convinced to move on and find a safe place."