Fear the Walking Dead returned as what felt like a very different show. It felt more like an episode of Lost, really, focusing on one single character — in this case Nick — and flashing back to reveal a significant piece of his past.
Nick hiding on a car in Fear the Walking Dead. Image: Richard Foreman Jr/AMC
Nick’s father, and likely Alicia’s too, was emotionally absent in his later years and died in a car accident before Nick could reconcile with him, while Nick was in rehab. The pain of the loss is one of the main reasons he relapsed after leaving rehab and the flashback even made it to the first scene of the entire series, inside the church, linking everything together.
In the present, we saw Nick trying to survive on his own, heading towards Tijuana, a place he hopes he’ll find “dead that aren’t monsters”. Things started with a random family we didn’t know, he was beaten and robbed, then almost shot to death, bitten by a few dogs and finally made it to Tijuana where a new character named Luciana (Danay Garcia) introduced him to a doctor who saved his life.
Nick told the doctor (played by Paul Calderon) he wouldn’t have minded if he died in the wilderness, which is odd considering where we left Nick at the mid-season finale. He specifically left his family wanting to walk his own path, away from their questionable morals. Why would he be OK dying? It wasn’t really a character trait I believed of him, especially after an episode where he continually struggled to survive. Was he lying? Looking for sympathy? In the end, all we really need to know in the larger narrative is he made it to Tijuana and it looks like things will be OK. They obviously won’t, but it looks like that.
Overall, it wasn’t the strongest return for the series, especially for anyone who left the midseason finale with burning questions — no Madison, no Travis, this was all about Nick. Either way, I did enjoy that Fear the Walking Dead tried something different and they did it by spending more time with, by far, the most interesting character on the show.
Like you, we’ll be keeping an eye on Fear the Walking Dead and if something interesting happens, you can be sure we’ll be here to talk about it.