Fear the Walking Dead: A guide to the first season
By Susie Graham
Pilot
August 23rd arrives. Many of us tuned into the season 5 marathon and the Talking Dead: Season 6 Preview Special before the exciting premiere of Fear the Walking Dead!
The pilot opens with Nick waking up in the abandoned church-turned-drug-den. He is looking for his friend and we hear the first words of the series!
“Gloria? Gloria!?”
He senses something wrong. He sees dead bodies. He sees Gloria. When she turns around we are like Rick Grimes meeting Bunny Slipper Girl, we recognize that Gloria is a walker. Poor Nick is in shock and fear-yes, fear. We can like the title now!
He has zero recognition of what’s going on. He doesn’t know if it’s a drug-induced hallucination or insanity. But it doesn’t matter, his fear and instinct take over and he runs. Runs and then gets run over-by a car.
Watch Nick find Gloria!
He finds himself in a hospital. Yay. Nice parallel. I like the Nick and Rick rhyme, too. So far they are doing well with keeping the connection to the Walking Dead world and still making it very different.
We meet Nick’s family: Madison, his mom and Alicia, his sister. We infer a new boyfriend status in Travis and find out that Travis has a son and an ex-wife. His son is having trouble dealing with his father leaving and trying to get him to become friends with Nick and Alicia.
We meet Alicia’s boyfriend, Matt, who is supposed to meet Alicia at the beach later and never shows up and stops answering her texts.
We meet Tobias, a smart, troubled student, who has been learning about the mysterious illness online and brings a knife to school for protection. Madison helps him avoid getting in trouble after almost being caught by the principal going through the metal detector. We see that Madison and Tobias have a good student/teacher connection and Tobias has evidently spoken with Madison in the past about troubles with other students.
We meet Calvin who presents himself to Madison and Travis as a clean-cut kid who knows nothing about where Nick might be when Nick escapes from the hospital and Travis and Madison are searching for him. A modern Eddie Haskell!
Me meet Calvin again in a restaurant with Nick and find out he is Nick’s drug connection . Calvin, in pre-emptive fear for his business and for what Nick might say or do in this hallucinatory state, takes Nick out to kill him and gets killed in the struggle. But as we already know, from The Walking Dead, we’re all infected.
Calvin turns and we see the start of Tobias’ voice over from the trailers starting to play out.
When civilization ends, it ends fast.
Extras:
Interview with Lincoln A. Castellanos
Prediction polls for episode 2
Spoilers are included about the episodes discussed. Don’t go on if you haven’t seen Episode 2 of Fear the Walking Dead!
Next: Episode 2