This stripping away of character motivation and personality applies to Strand and Daniel, too. The former was once a smooth-talking conniver and backstabber, whose primary concern was saving his own skin. The Strand we have now is so watered down to the point of being a shadow of his former self. Colman Domingo is a great actor, but Strand in his present incarnation isn’t just flat, he’s boring. Strand is far more interesting when he’s being selfish. We got a glimmer of this in the first half of season 5, when he confessed to Charlie that his cowardice essentially doomed the cargo plane to crash land in the middle of nowhere. But this revelation barely made a ripple in the storyline; I think Fear let him off the hook too easily. I’m hoping that in Fear the Walking Dead season 6 we’ll see Strand once again fall victim to his selfish impulses.

As for Daniel, it’s great to have Rubén Blades back in the mix, but not as a barber. Anyone who’s watched Fear from the beginning knows Daniel is capable of terrible things. Not only did he torture his daughter’s soldier boyfriend in Season 1, he also unleashed an entire stadium of zombies upon a nearby military base. He also survived being shot in the face (by Strand!) and the dam collapse at the end of Season 3. Now, however, this former butcher and torturer is more concerned about his cat Skidmark. And…that’s about it. I understand people can change (take Morgan, for example), but for all intents and purposes, the Daniel we knew and loathed is no more. And that’s a shame, because the character is at his best when he’s seemingly at his worst. I’m hoping Season 6 will see a return to form for Daniel—that being separated from his new family (especially Charlie) will encourage him to draw upon his unscrupulous past to insure a better future for himself and the caravan.

4. Make the dead a bigger threat than the living

It seems to me that anyone who has survived this long into the apocalypse (and who hasn’t been holed up in a bunker the whole time) has become altogether too proficient at combatting the undead.

To that end, I suggest Introducing fast zombies into the mix. Yes, I realize this is The Walking Dead universe we’re talking about, not The Running Dead. (And yes, I know that our human survivors are themselves “the walking dead” too.) Many zombie movie purists might push back against the idea of running zombies. Romero’s shamblers in the original Night of the Living Dead set the standard for reanimated-corpse mobility for years until Return of the Living Dead. But even then, fast zombies were slow to catch on. More recent fare, most notably Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake, 28 Days Later (I know, not technically zombies), Train to Busan, and especially Netflix’s Black Summer, have all capitalized on the undead as relentless killing machines.