Fear TWDs PADRE Mystery Is Repeating A Walking Dead Villain

By diving into the mystery of PADRE, Fear the Walking Dead season 7 is risking a repeat of a villain twist from The Walking Dead season 4.

By diving into the mystery behind “Padre”, Fear the Walking Dead season 7 is risking a repeat of a villain twist from The Walking Dead season 4. Right now, the meaning of Padre is one of the biggest unanswered questions. The show is only two episodes into season 7, and Padre has already been brought up twice, with both occurrences stemming from different storylines.

The series is offering very few details in regards to what Padre actually is in The Walking Dead universe. In the Fear the Walking Dead season 7 premiere, Will (Gus Halper) couldn’t even tell Strand (Colman Domingo) if Padre was a person or a place. All he knew was that Alicia’s underground bunker group was convinced that finding it would be good for their people. What made Alicia think Padre was so important was never revealed. Morgan (Lennie James) and Grace (Karen David) gained their own piece of the Padre puzzle when they learned about saw a map of its possible locations. What they found out from Bea and Fred suggested that Padre is indeed a place. According to them, it’s safe and is being treated as a big secret by those who live there.

The ambiguous way that Fear the Walking Dead is teasing the truth about Padre draws comparisons to a key mystery from The Walking Dead season 4. While on the lookout for a new home in the aftermath of the prison’s fall, Rick’s group learned of Terminus, a community that they knew nothing about but was said to be welcome to all survivors. Similar to how people are viewing Padre in Fear the Walking Dead, Terminus was treated as the answer to all their problems. Of course, that’s not at all what it turned out to be. Rather than being their salvation, the Terminus group emerged as a gang of evil cannibals led by Gareth (Andrew J. West). Finding them led to Bob (Lawrence Gillard, Jr.) being killed off and a brutal battle for survival at Gabriel’s church. Unless the Padre tease actually culminates in this place turning out to be just as wonderful as people think, this could very well turn into the show’s version of the Terminus reveal.

Considering that things are rarely what they seem in The Walking Dead universe, there’s a good chance that finding Padre won’t lead to happiness and safety for Morgan’s group. Instead, it may be that the search for Padre is setup for the show’s next villains, who could be trying to lure people to their base. If that’s the case, it would be a predictable development that has too much in common with not only the Terminus story in The Walking Dead, but also FTWD's "The End is the Beginning" message, which led to the introduction of Teddy's cult.

Padre being used as a trap for Morgan’s group would be a problematic twist for the series. Perhaps a better conclusion for the search would be for it tie in with Victor Strand’s villain arc. It could be that Padre really is a safe haven, but the main characters may never benefit from finding it if Strand gets to it first and takes advantage of its resource. Padre could be what ultimately pits Morgan against Strand in Fear the Walking Dead season 7.