The timeline

How the timeline was created, through the study of sources, articles, interviews, and all the hidden or explicit hints that appeared in the series

When rumors began circulating in 2010 about the upcoming release of a new zombie series, as a fan, I couldn’t help but rejoice, eagerly anticipating.
Seen the pilot, I was already immersed in that world of terror, danger, pure fear of the other in all its possible forms. The characters who immediately became dear to me, the lost emptiness of the rural settings, the overwhelming one of the metropolises, the anguish and pure terror into which I was plunged at the beginning of every episode and beyond, The Walking Dead had bewitched me, captivated me, ruinously infected me with an addiction from which, “fortunately,” I’m still not free.
From the very beginning, intrigued by the precise definition of the time of the series, over the years I have collected many clues and more or less hidden traces online that have allowed me to build a sort of personal calendar of The Walking Dead universe.

This kind of fascination with the real temporal placement of events pushed me to create a timeline, which includes all the events of The Walking Dead, of the three spinoffs Fear The Walking Dead, The Walking Dead World Beyond, Tales of the Walking Dead and of the webseries.
It is not a static realization but in continuous evolution, which is updated following the course of the various seasons and that includes also the new released series as the one dedicated to Daryl set in Europe, TWD Dead City which sees Maggie and Negan as protagonists in Manhattan and TWD The Ones Who Live, the spin-off about the two main characters that has replaced the long-announced Rick film trilogy.

There are countless clues hidden here and there in the show’s footage, and many statements made by actors and producers during interviews on talk shows and television programs, but the most important source from which I’ve drawn verified information is the article by Alyce Wax (see sources below), AMC producer of the documentary The Walking Dead: The Journey So Far about the first six seasons of TWD.
So, by combining all the information collected online, I created a file that showed exactly months and years in which the events took place, as everything existing on the net always spoke only of a sum of the past days, therefore a little difficult to place in an ideal calendar.


THE CLUES                                                                                    
                                                                                    
FEAR THE WALKING DEAD – Season One
The most precise clue from which I figured it all out from was the writing you see on a banner ad in FTWD season one So close, yet so far when Trevis, Chris and Liza flee a street demonstration in Los Angeles, and which reports as the date of an event that of August 7th, 2010 (…). Whether it is future or just past, we are around those days.
So it was enough to calculate everything from there.
Another shot took me a little off the road, and forced me to do some recalculations; when Nick escapes from the hospital, he is framed in a screen of the internal security cameras, which shows the date of February 4th, 2015 (…). This intrigued me, as it was totally out of time, then I found out that the pilot episode of FTWD had been shot in February 2015, realizing that it was an oversight in the filming phase and then slipped away in post-editing.

TWD WORLD BEYOND – Season One
Confirmation that my calculations were correct came in the first episode of TWD World Beyond, when Elton, while at school, takes notes in a notebook, writing the date August 19th (…).
We are on the eve of the tenth commemoration of Monument Day, which recalls the day when “the sky fell” after the outbreak of the apocalypse (that would be the day the cities were bombed), therefore on August 20th, 2010.

TWD WORLD BEYOND – Season Two
The conclusion of the second season of World Beyond provided me with further and definitive confirmation; It’s established that the last day of World Beyond is Monday, October 26th, 2020 (…), as it is established that the events of that day occurred approximately two months after the tenth Monument Day celebration, which according to my timeline was August 20th, 2020. Everything lines up.
Furthermore, in the episode Who Are You?, Jadis, while talking to Huck, confirms that she has been a member of the CRM for six years and that to get to her current position, she had to hand over an important friend (Rick).
If we consider the time of Rick’s disappearance (November 2013), and the time it took Jadis to gain the CRM’s favor (a year, I think, is a good compromise), the timeline also fits perfectly with that of The Walking Dead.

WEB SERIES – DEAD IN THE WATER
Further confirmation of the accuracy of my timeline came with the latest web series, FTWD – Dead in the Water, where a shot shows the ultrasound of Riley’s newborn taped in front of a telex strip, indicating the baby’s birth date, of which only the digits 0/10 are legible (…). Given the way dates are expressed in America, with the month written before the day, given that the events are unfolding during Operation Cobalt (the Pennsylvania was asked to launch a missile on Chicago), given that we have already established with certainty that Operation Cobalt occurred on August 20th, 2010 (notes taken at school by Elton on WB (…)), and given that the baby was already born a few days ago (when Riley talks to his wife on the phone, the answering machine answers, so she is no longer in the hospital), but not long ago (his classmates are still wishing him a happy birthday), the baby could only have been born on August 10th, 2010 (08/10/10).

TWD THE ONES WHO LIVE
A very specific clue is finally provided in the third episode of TWD The Ones Who Live, where it is clearly shown that the night of Michonne’s escape attempt from Philadelphia, organized by Rick, was exactly Tuesday, February 1st, 2022 (…).
And again in the fourth episode, Michonne says that RJ is “almost eight years old.” It’s February 2022, and RJ was born in the summer of 2014.
The dates fit perfectly here, too.

TWD DEAD CITY – Season One
Considering TWD Dead City, which many insist on wrongly placing in 2028/29, we have clear evidence that it actually takes place in 2024 (season one) and 2025 (season two). In the third episode of the first season, Negan, addressing the tribes of Manhattan, tells his story in the third person. During his narration, he states:
“Twelve, fifteen years ago, there was a guy in the South (himself – he’s from Virginia, which is south of NYC). He appeared out of nowhere, and everyone rallied around him because he knew what they needed, what they wanted. Protection. Sanctuary. So we built a freaking fortress (the Sanctuary).”
This statement implies the absolute impossibility of Dead City being set in 2028/29, that is, five or six years after the end of the original series.
If we were in 2028, 12 years ahead would put us in 2016, 15 years ahead would put us in 2013. We know for certain that the Saviors were already active in 2011 (Abraham and Glenn were killed by Negan in March 2012). Therefore, considering a placement in 2028 is impossible. If Dead City – Season One is taking place in 2024 (as per my timeline), 12 years would make a lot of sense because it would be 2012, while 15 would put us in 2009, which is way behind 2011, probably the most certain year of the Saviors’ birth, which definitely occurred between the fall of 2010 and the early months of 2011.
I still remind that Negan Smith became “Negan” after the death of his wife Lucille, a few months after the outbreak of the epidemic, in November 2010.

TWD DEAD CITY – Season Two
Another important and rather precise indication that confirms Dead City’s location in 2024 (season one) and 2025 (season two) is offered in the sixth episode of the second season when Annie and Joshua are introduced (…). According to my timeline, Joshua was born in early 2022 (during the attack on Riverbend in TWD11 (July 2021) Annie tells Maggie that she is two months pregnant), and in the frame you can clearly see a child of maximum four years old (2021 – 2025), and not seven/eight as it should be if the story was set in 2028/2029. 


In constructing this timeline, I also had to address the countless chronological errors that unfortunately litter the series. While it seems highly unlikely that, years into a global apocalypse, the characters would still be able to accurately track the passing of time, over the years and seasons, I had to account for and track chronological errors, oversights, or miscalculations, due to a rather careless production.


THE ERRORS

FEAR THE WALKING DEAD – Season Five
During the episode Skidmark from the fifth season of FTWD (…), a wall calendar displays the month of October, when in fact it was March at the time (according to Alyce Wax’s article). From a character history perspective, this could be explained as a sort of “desire for normality” on Daniel’s part, which simply drove him to flip through the pages of a calendar day after day, as was done in the daily routine of a now-lost world. But it’s still a chronological error.

THE WALKING DEAD – Season Ten
The theory that twelve years had passed since the beginning of the apocalypse, as depicted in the episode This Is Negan from the tenth season of The Walking Dead, has sparked much discussion among fans of the series, as at this point in the story, just over ten years had passed.
Or again, in the same episode, the image of Lucille’s cell phone screen shows the date of November 12th (…), when in reality the date should have been around May.

TWD THE ONES WHO LIVE
Another error appears in the second episode of TWD The Ones Who Live, where an indication states six years after the bridge, when in reality seven years have passed. If it was six years after the bridge, we would be roughly at the point where Judith saves Magna and her group, and the night of the heads on pikes occurs, while what we see is Michonne having just left Virgil’s Island, which occurs exactly one year after the events mentioned above.


In conclusion, I hope that this work, carried out with love, passion, and above all, attachment to a historic and unforgettable series, can serve as a reference for the many fans who, even today, after years of broadcast, remain faithful to it.

Vincenzo Mei

main sources
A. Wox, ‘The Walking Dead’ Timeline, Explained, Apr 13,2020, Collider
D. Patten, Jeffrey Dean Morgan & Lauren Cohan, Nov 20, 2022, Deadline
Inside The Walking Dead: Dead City Presented By SERVPRO | Show Me More, Jul 24, 2023, AMC
AMC, Talking Dead
Comic-Con San Diego
New York Comic-Con

thanks
CINEWIND for the video
Musical theme – ‘Experience’ (A Time Lapse) – 2014, Ludovico Einaudi