Fear The Walking Dead, Survival Rule Of The Week: Striking The Balance

Fear the Walking Dead season 7

Who you were vs. who you’ve become

One of the people this week’s episode focused on most prominently was Daniel Salazar and his quest to rescue his daughter, Ofelia, from the clutches of his long-time enemy, Strand. We were reminded that Daniel had been at odds with Strand since season three, and their relationship hadn’t improved. Even though Ofelia was long dead, Daniel’s distorted memories, and lies told to him by Luciana, had left him convinced that Ofelia was being held prisoner, and he was determined to save her, come hell or high water.

As he, Strand, and Alicia made their way up the tower, they had to detour to the infirmary, where Daniel learned the harsh truth: Not only was Ofelia not in the Tower, but she had long been dead. In a fit of rage, Daniel prepared to gun Strand down, remembering that Strand had lied to him about Ofelia’s whereabouts years earlier in Mexico and for lying to him again that Ofelia was in the tower. That was until Strand directed his attention to Charlie, lying sick from radiation poisoning in the infirmary. Trying to appeal to Daniel’s mercy, Strand told Daniel to spend his time with Charlie, to whom he’d become a surrogate father, but Daniel wouldn’t have it, wanting Charlie to look away as he exacted revenge on Strand. It was only because Alicia reminded him that Ofelia had initially turned away from him after learning about his dark past, and that he wouldn’t want Charlie to do the same that stayed his hand. I bring all this us because a zombie apocalypse will change you somehow. I say this because traumatic events like an apocalypse always do, even if in small ways. In Daniel’s case, he’s been trying to shed the darker elements of his life left from his time in the Salvadorean Civil War. Still, in the case of most of the rest of us, the apocalypse will likely add darker elements to us, but the principle is the same.

On the one hand, you’ll have that part of you that existed before the world turned into hell on Earth, who will, in all likelihood, be a much more innocent and benevolent person, and, on the other, you’ll have the person the apocalypse will have made you, likely a far harder, distrustful, and brutal individual.

The reality is you can’t stay who you were before the apocalypse — A person who may have never had to fight for their life or struggled to survive — with all the same outlooks on things because that’s not the way the world will be anymore. It will be a harsh, dog-eat-dog existence, one where being unwilling to do what’s needed to survive will likely get you killed.

However, you also can’t dive whole hog into the kind of person the apocalypse is likely to make you because, if you do, you will become not only the very person you likely feared at the start of the apocalypse but also one that other people will assuredly kill at the first chance. What you need to do is remember the good parts of who you were when everything started and try to hang onto being that person while recognizing the value of some of the changes you’ve had to make to survive, but not steering into them completely, lest you become someone that, if you’d met them at the beginning, those very survival instincts you value, would have told you to kill.