IT’S THAT TIME AGAIN!
Last week’s episode of Fear The Walking Dead was…strange. Nearly half of the episode was spent inside of a dream in Grace’s head, but, to her, it was more like traveling forward through time, seeing where everyone at the dam would be sixteen years into the future. There, she met a young lady who she would discover was her daughter, Athena, who helped guide her through this bizarre dreamscape in the hopes of helping her mother wake up in time to ensure that the future would come to pass.
Like I said: It was strange.
Of course, as we would learn, it was not to be: While Grace, despite what her premonition predicted, survived giving birth to her daughter, Athena…did not, dying before even having a chance. Even for a Walking Dead show, it was a severely bleak ending.
What clues were hidden inside Grace’s dream in last week’s episode of Fear The Walking Dead? Find out in the latest Things To Note!
These events, however, were also, obviously, the crux of this episode; the only way to miss them was to have not been watching in the first place! While they’re important, the obvious stuff isn’t exactly what we’re here for. What we’re here for are the things that you might overlook: The trivia, hints, clues, and references that you might not even notice. I love to find all of these things and amass them all here for you, so you don’t have to go looking!
Are you ready? It’s time for this week’s installment of Fear The Walking Dead: Things To Note!
1) This episode’s “Previously” recap focuses on Morgan’s run-in with the first members of The Beginners that we met (Back in “The Key”), as well as Alicia, Althea, Wes, Luciana’s visit to the Holding in the episode of the same name.
2) This episode gets its name from the Roy Orbison song, which plays at the beginning of the episode (And that Athena listens to throughout), as well as the fact that much of this episode takes place inside Grace’s dreams.
3) In Grace’s opening dream, as she and Athena get back to the dam, Athena says that Grace was nearly “Husk chum.” If you wanted to count it, “Husk” would be the twenty-eighth unique name for the dead in Fear The Walking Dead.
4) With us seeing adult Max in Grace’s dream, it’s, technically, the first time we’ve seen Max this season.
5) This episode’s title sequence features a silhouette of Grace standing in a forest opening with a horse, a house, and a fire in the background.
6) From Grace’s grave, we learn her last name: Mukherjee.
7) In Grace’s dream, we see Dwight and Sherry with their children: A son, John, and a daughter, Tina. For those who may not know, Tina is named after Sherry’s little sister, who was killed by walkers in The Walking Dead season six episode, which introduced her, Sherry, and Dwight, “Always Accountable.”
8) Future Morgan tells Grace that Althea left some time ago chasing a story, though he suspected it was actually the person she was chasing. Since Al has already left to warn Isabelle about The Beginners before this episode’s events, her absence here suggests that Grace (Who, presumably, doesn’t know about Isabelle) believes that Al isn’t coming back.
9) As Grace begins to realize that she’s unconscious, she has a flashback to herself getting blood samples from her coworkers (Judging by what you can read from the vials, specifically Robert Deeley, one of the radioactive walkers from last season). Then Matthew (Athena’s biological father) turning. This is the first instance of Grace’s backstory that we’ve seen since her debut in season five’s “The Hurt That Will Happen.”
10) When Grace tells Athena that she is only a dream, Athena smacks her with her staff, which Grace reacts to. Is Athena’s attack actually a representation of her kicking inside Grace’s womb?
11) Upon realizing that she and Athena need to reach Morgan in the stables inside the dream to wake herself up, Grace conjures up a white horse. It’s likely because (As we see when her memories start intruding into the dream) she remembers catching glimpses of the painting of a white horse inside the stable.
12) As Grace and Athena navigate through the highway, we see a walker in a car in a radiation suit. Was this a nightmare of Grace’s, dying from radiation poisoning while in the suit? Or did she actually see one of her other coworkers die whilst dressed in a radiation suit?
13) When Morgan tries to protect himself and Grace from Riley, he pulls up a gate attached to a cart(?) loaded with debris. Clearly, someone tried to use that as a barricade, probably when the outbreak first hit. Presumably, either someone else inside the stable turned, or the occupants left and didn’t return since the stable doesn’t appear to have been breached by walkers at any time.
14) Riley (In Grace’s dream) is the first walker we’ve seen talk in Fear The Walking Dead since Nick saw Gloria’s walker talking to him in a hallucination in season two’s midseason premiere: “Grotesque.”
15) Athena is the twenty-first named character to die this season, and possibly the second baby to die in Fear if you assume that Vida (The female pirate from season two)’s baby was dead as Madison suggested in season two’s “Blood In The Streets.”
16) Did Morgan and Grace have to put Athena down? Would she turn, too, or, because she died before being out in the open air, it’s not an issue?
17) This is the second time in a Walking Dead series where the main character had an optimistic vision of the future that would ultimately not come to pass because a person crucial to that vision died in that episode, the first being Rick seeing Glenn in an idyllic future of Alexandria in The Walking Dead’s infamous season seven premiere episode, “The Day Will Come When You Won’t Be.”
And that ends our installment of Things To Note for this week! Was there anything you missed? Was there anything I missed? Let me know! If you like this and want to read more of my writings, specifically about how to survive a zombie apocalypse, why not pick up a copy of my book, The Rules: A Guide To Surviving The Zombie Apocalypse! And you can get it from Amazon here and on iTunes here!