Connecting The Walking Dead: ‘Brave’

Hope and Iris’s Backstory

Do you see this picture above? I’ve been seeing this for months, and, never having a need to use it (And, thus, see it full-sized), didn’t really know what it was showing until yesterday, when I watched World Beyond, and realized it was a trio of empties still in their seats from the plane they were on when they died.

Throughout the first episode, Iris refers to the night the apocalypse began as “The Night The Sky Fell”, the reason for this is because a plane crashed in the middle of Omaha (Or, at least, what I think is Omaha), separating Iris and her dad from Hope and their mother, who were forced to traverse through the plane’s wreckage to find safety.

Seeing this immediately reminded me of something: Flight 462.

If you don’t remember, Flight 462 was the first set of webisodes for Fear The Walking Dead, which told the story of Alex, a young woman attempting to escape Los Angeles via TruWest Flight 462 to Phoenix, Arizona. During the flight, another passenger becomes infected and turns, biting a flight attendant and his wife, before finally being put down. In the struggle, the flight’s air marshal attempts to shoot the infected passenger, but hits one of the plane’s windows instead, causing the aircraft to suffer rapid decompression before crashing somewhere in the Pacific Ocean near L.A. and ripping apart in the process.

Well, as we learn from Iris and Hope, Flight 462 was clearly not the only plane which experienced major turbulence as the outbreak quickly descended into a full-blown apocalypse.

Much like what we saw in Fear, several passengers turned upon impact, with many still wearing their oxygen masks, while others found themselves ensnared in the planes various wires and oxygen tubes in the shattered fuselage.

What happened on that plane? Did someone turn mid-flight, like Flight 462, but, not have the luxury of someone familiar with the infected amongst the passengers? Did they simply not find any place to land, ran out of fuel, and crashed?

I’m honestly hoping we see more of Hope and Iris’s backstory from the beginning of the outbreak, so we can see how many more parallels there are between what happened to them at the beginning, and we saw at the beginning of Fear The Walking Dead.