Fear The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week: Choices
By Liam O'Leary
As made evident in this past Sunday’s Fear The Walking Dead, while luck helps, your survival often hinges on your choices.
Choices. This week’s episode of Fear The Walking Dead was all about choices. From Alicia, to Ofelia, to Strand, to Nick, it was all about choices.
Our choices can sometimes seem small, but, they are very often the difference between whether people live or whether people die. Choices mean everything.
Let’s start with Alicia, for example. We started this episode with her driving through the desert alone.
Why? Because she chose to break her family’s seemingly endless cycle of trying to find a place they believed safe, only to have it pulled out from under them.
After L.A. fell, after losing the hacienda, the Rosarito, and now Broke Jaw, Alicia had gotten sick of the pipe dreams, and sought to make a go of living, not just surviving, on her own.
Will it work out for her? Only time will tell. But, that’s something we need to remember: Our choices don’t happen in a vacuum, and the ones we think might be good at the start, may not prove to be further down the road.
Strand, for example, unless I’m completely off the mark, probably told Proctor John about the dam in exchange for something.
Obviously, Strand did that as insurance because he was certain that Daniel would, at best, renege on his deal with Madison when he inevitably found Ofelia dead.
This wouldn’t have been such a bad idea…had he not miscalculated. With Daniel having seen past his grief and agreed to let Madison, Strand, Taqa, and the others stay at the dam, Strand has now given vital intel on his new home to a shadowy underworld merchant with an army of mercenaries at his disposal! This is bad.
When you make your choices in a zombie apocalypse, you’ve got to think ahead and not end up walking yourself into a trap.
This is because our choices, no matter what, have consequences.
Whether at the time our choices are for good or for ill, there will be consequences to them, in some form or another.
Look at Ofelia. The better part of this Sunday’s episode centered around her slowly dying from an infected bite.
But, the reason she was bit was that she chose to go into the vent to remove the infected obstruction.
Now, granted, she didn’t have much option, but, nevertheless, her injury was all the result of her choice. Something will come of our choices, it’s inevitable. We just need to hope we’re prepared for what that is.
However, we make whatever the results of choices more likely to be harmful when we’re reckless in the choosing.
Some decisions may be hard to see the negative outcome of them at the time, like with Strand’s, but others, the negatives are plainly obvious.
Like with Nick. Sure, he and Troy got lucky walking with the horde while high, and that they didn’t notice Nick’s whispering, but, it was only luck.
With so much riding on our decisions, we can’t afford to be reckless with them. When we see a choice whose negative outcomes can far outweigh their positive ones, don’t willfully make the wrong choice, because, when you do, you take control of your life out of your hands, and place it firmly in chance.
At the end of the day in a zombie apocalypse, we are the masters of our own fates. We can, to a certain degree, control our destinies. We can control where we go, when we act, how we act, if we act, and all of those go into determining what happens to us.
The question is choice. What fate will you choose for yourself when the dead rise?
Next: Fear The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week: Caution and hope
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!