Fear The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week: Caution and hope

If this Sunday’s Fear The Walking Dead taught us anything, it’s that you need a little caution and a lot of hope to survive a zombie apocalypse.

I’m just going to come right out and say it: I really liked Sunday’s Fear The Walking Dead. It felt like one of the best pure survival episodes of the show in a while. On one hand, we had Alicia trying desperately to hold things together inside the bunker while the survivors slowly ran out of air; On another, we had Ofelia and Crazy Dog crawling through the air ducts to try to clear them so the aforementioned survivors could breathe again; And on another, we had Nick and Troy try to reach the fuel reserves to distract the horde and get them away from the bunker; Just juicy survival all ways around.

And, as I watched it yesterday, I couldn’t help be struck by two themes: Caution, and hope.

Caution because, well, in this episode, we saw a threat we haven’t seen before in Walking Dead: Suffocation.

Yet, just because it isn’t high on our list of ways to die in a zombie apocalypse, doesn’t mean it’s one we should overlook.

You see, zombies can create a whole slew of problems that you might never have run into otherwise! They can surround you and trap you in a bunch of enclosed, small spaces, that you normally wouldn’t get trapped in.

“Oh, like I’m going to find myself in some bunker. C’mon, man.” I can hear you say. And, you’d be right: You probably wouldn’t end up in a bunker. But, what about…a car? If a mob of zombies surrounded your car on the highway, how long do you think you’d last? Days? Hours?

To survive a zombie apocalypse, you need to think of the things people don’t like thinking about. You need to think of all the myriad ways things could go wrong. You need to think of things like dehydration, starvation, and, yes, suffocation, and how you would deal with those threats. If you think ahead about such things and take precautions, maybe you won’t find yourself forced to decide who needs to die so the rest of your group has enough air to breath.

Of course, things were not all bleak. The other theme from Sunday’s episode was hope.

There might be some who don’t put much value in hope, because it isn’t tangible, but, trust me, it is more valuable than all the food, water, air, and guns in the world.

Hope is the thing that gives you the will to carry on. A zombie apocalypse is going to be very bleak, and, when things are bleak, you need hope.

Hope is what allows people to keep on trying to survive when it may appear that that is impossible. When people are teetering on the brink of giving up and just letting themselves die, hope is what keeps them from falling.

Hope is what leads people to take risks to save other people. When hope allows you to believe there is the chance we can keep going or help others keep going, it allows us to act the most human.

Hope is essential to survival. You need to be able to believe that things will get better, that you can make them better.

Hope is the only thing that let’s you do that.

Without hope…you’re already gone.

Next: Fear The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week: Family

And that’s our survival rule of the week!! Hopefully, it will help you should you ever need it and give you that mental edge that will prove so crucial once the dead start eating everyone.

If you like this and want to find out more rules to survive the zombie apocalypse, why not pick up a copy of my book, The Rules: A Guide To Surviving The Zombie Apocalypse! You can get it on Kindle here and on iTunes here!