Fear The Walking Dead, SROTW: Giving Up Is Not An Option

Fear the Walking Dead

Don’t give up on your friends.

Much of this week’s episode of Fear The Walking Dead focused on Alicia’s younger self urging her to rescue the younger Alicia’s friend, who she claimed could help Alicia. It was eventually revealed that the child’s friend was none other than Victor Strand. Who, in his despair, over once again currying Alicia’s wrath and inadvertently destroying his sanctuary, told Alicia to leave without him. Despite her anger at Strand’s hasty decision to kill Wes in the previous episode, egged on by her younger self, Alicia returned to rescue Strand, determined not to let him die a horrible zombie-cancer-related death in the penthouse of the tower, and managed in spite of her illness, and Strand’s drunken incapacitation, got the two of them out of dodge, ensuring the last thing she had to family carried on.

In short, a part of Alicia refused to give up on Strand, and because of that, she saved his life and set him on a course to carry out the mission she and her mother had been trying so hard to achieve since their group left Mexico years earlier.

As we spend more time with people in a zombie apocalypse, relying on one another for survival, we will likely become friends with the people in our group, even if they were originally strangers when we met them. I’m even inclined to think that if we survive alongside them for long enough, they will become as close to us as family.

This is why we can’t give up on them. Will our friends make mistakes? Yes, but short of revealing themselves to be a legit creep, or a cannibal, or a serial killer, we can’t just bail on them when they screw up. The people in your group in the apocalypse will be the people you come to rely on the most, they will be the people who will watch your back when you’re most vulnerable, and they will be the ones who’ll help you when you screw up, and when you’re at your lowest, and you need to do the same for them. If you’re unwilling to fight for them when they need you, you can’t expect them to fight for you.

A group in a zombie apocalypse is a symbiotic relationship, with each member coming together to contribute to their shared survival, but, that relationship only works if everyone is willing to work towards it. When you give up on your friends, what you’re really doing is making your whole group, including yourself, weaker by telling everyone else that they can’t count on you.