Connecting The Walking Dead: ‘Madman Across The Water’

3) Elton’s Darkest Day

While most of the show focused on the group trying to get to and across the Mississippi River, it felt like about half of it was dedicated to Elton Ortiz, explaining in great detail why he is claustrophobic (Something we saw in this episode and the previous week’s, when he spotted the “locker walker”), by showing us how he remembers “The Night The Sky Fell”.

It begins with Elton and his mom (Dressed in the same outfit we saw her in in Hope’s flashbacks to the night the outbreak hit) being taken into his dad’s office inside the Nebraska Museum of Natural History, where his father begins to explain to Elton about the extinction of the dinosaurs before his mom gets a call to come to Nebraska State University for a staff meeting. As she leaves, Elton’s dad warns her that there’s a lot of police activity near the hospital. Uh oh.

Some time after Amelia leaves, Elton sits down with his dad, and cleans off a dinosaur fossil at his father’s workbench. As they do this, you can police sirens wailing in the distance, and an alarm blaring over the radio on Elton’s dad’s desk. Uh oh.

Next, as we can hear people being attacked by empties, and someone (Whether another survivor looking for shelter or an empty, we don’t find out) banging on the door, we see a panicked Isaac Ortiz pick up Elton and place him in a crate, before telling him to hide and stay quiet while he looked for a safe escape route. Before he leaves, he tells Elton not to be afraid, and gives him the triceratops fossil they were cleaning earlier as a talisman. This is the last either we or Elton see of his father alive. Uh oh.

Finally, we hear soldiers storm the museum, with one killing an empty as they pass by, declaring the area clear. Elton finally steps out, only to find his father, missing his legs, and clearly being the empty he heard the soldier put down. He grabs a souvenir bag and places the triceratops horn in it before leaving the museum, finding the government evac order, and begins marching toward the campus. Alone.

This is a lot to take in. While the important stuff is Elton with his parents, learning where his claustrophobia and fatalism come from, and learning how he came to Campus Colony, we also learn a great deal about when in The Walking Dead’s timeline Elton’s tragic story takes place.

Firstly, when Isaac warns Amelia to be careful, he, honestly, doesn’t sound that concerned. This means that while the outbreak is starting, it hasn’t gotten to the point where stories of it have really broken through, or, at least, Isaac hasn’t been seeing them. That said, the fact that there were cops at the hospital at all suggests that Nebraska may have been one of the five states reporting incidents that Tobias warned Madison Clark about in the pilot episode of Fear The Walking Dead.

Secondly, the fact that things start normal during Elton’s flashback, then rather quickly deteriorate to the point where he and his dad can hear the carnage outside on the street and inside the museum not only parallels, but, almost certainly means that this flashback took place during, episodes two and three of Fear. 

During those episodes, things in Los Angeles started out ordinarily enough, but, once the LAPD gunned down an infected, a riot broke out, followed shortly thereafter by the infected, who ravaged across parts of the city until, just like in Elton’s flashback, the military arrived to wipe out the dead and establish safe zones in the area. Hell, even the fact that a plane crashed into Lincoln resembles the end of episode three of Fear, where Nick Clark notices a Flight 462 flying erratically as it soars above the hills before it too eventually crashes into the Pacific Ocean.

It’s both strange and fun to see the same day we’re familiar with, but, in a completely different setting, with completely different characters. I sincerely hope we see more flashbacks like this as World Beyond moves forward, because we saw so little of the actual beginning of the outbreak in Fear, and, frankly, it still annoys me. But, considering that this episode also revealed to Hope that the woman she accidentally shot was Elton’s mother, I have the feeling we may not see the last of this horrible day for the Ortiz family…

So what did you think?  Did any of these connects slip past you? Were there any that you thought I missed? Let me know in the comments! If you like this and want to see something different from me, specifically my tips 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 also get it at Amazon here, on iTunes here!