If you’re a fan of The Walking Dead, then you may be familiar with AMC’s Story Sync, which allows you to glean more information about the episode you’re watching in real-time. AMC continued the tradition with Sunday night’s premiere of Fear the Walking Dead, and, if you didn’t get online to play along with the episode, you may have missed a few cool details.
Fear the Walking Dead starts off as the walker apocalypse is just beginning, so, unlike The Walking Dead, we’ll be privy to some new situations that the folks from Georgia have not experienced. One of those situations is how medical facilities begin to handle the fact that the dead are coming back to life. If you remember in the FTWD pilot, Nick is put in a room with an elderly gentleman who dies. The doctors work on the man after he flatlines, then — to the uninitiated — the docs and nurses run the body out of the room to a place “downstairs.” Seems weird to those who are unfamiliar with the zombie outbreak that they would treat a deceased body like a time bomb. During Sunday’s Story Sync, though, AMC gave us a closer look at the protocols in handling the deceased in this document.
In the faux document from the World Health Organization, you can see the tried execution of a plan to the “management of the deceased.” While it states that there is a “still-limited knowledge of an as-of-yet unidentified strain of virus,” it recognizes that, after 60 seconds of trying to resuscitate the deceased, hospitals are to restrain the remains “by any means necessary.” Also, reanimated remains are “to be regarded as a biological hazard.”
So, from this document, you kind of get a scope of where health officials are at with their knowledge of the spreading zombie epidemic, and it gives us some texture to the intricacies of what is going on in the world outside of the main characters’ plight. There was another document that was accessible during the pilot episode that put a face on the media aspect of the epidemic.
This faux newspaper clipping documents an incident in which police responded to a home in which a man was terrorizing his family. When they arrive at the residence, they find the man eating a cat. The man, Patrick Sutherland, attacks the officers who have no choice but to shoot him dead. One of the interesting items here is the fact that neighbors heard a dozen gunshots, which is obviously a reference to the undying nature of the walkers (unless, of course, you shoot them in the head). Also of note is the final paragraph that says that the incident was the 11th of such in as little as a week. This gives us a sense in just how early we are into the zombie apocalypse when the show starts: About a dozen zombie attacks have been reported thus far (still, there has to be many that have been unreported, as in Nick’s incident inside the abandoned church).
One final and cool nugget AMC gave us is a “viral video” version of the walker attacks from the freeway that became fodder for the news the next day. If you remember from the pilot, a news story goes viral when a helicopter captures cops and paramedics fighting with some walkers. The news report leads to schools being cancelled for the day as fear of an outbreak of some sort seemingly becomes realized. Now you can check out what seems to be framed as a camera phone’s perspective on the walker incident that Madison and Travis bypassed when they drove past the off-ramp.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=79tZJjtjfZ8&feature=youtu.be
During The Talking Dead before FTWD‘s pilot on Sunday, Greg Nicotero commented that, with The Walking Dead, you need to pay attention from the start; hints are littered within the show’s narrative. The same can be said about Fear the Walking Dead, and it’s pretty cool that AMC is helping to develop this new story with these viral extras.
