When last we left Fear the Walking Dead, the series’ intrepid junkie Nick (Frank Dillane) had abandoned his family to seek out a new fix: zombies. Nick had gone to live among the dead, because they are his new addiction. However, it wasn’t the first example of a character from the show embracing death. Nick had clearly fallen under the influence of Celia, the mother of Carlos who called the walkers the “changed ones.” They were not dead in her mind; they had simply moved on to the next stage of their life.
In fact, Celia did not fear the zombies; she revered them. She treated them as majestic creatures, like pets. It’s why she was so distraught when Strand shot Thomas Abigail in the head. Strand had taken away Abigail’s opportunity to come back in another form. Celia seemed to believe that the walkers were ghosts of some sort, that human spirits were buried under the torn flesh and the rotten, decomposing skin. It’s also why Celia did not fear her own death in the midseason finale, after Madison left her to be devoured by zombies. She was ready to embrace the next stage of her life.
Viewers who thought the way Celia and Nick embraced the “changed ones” was a temporary departure for Fear the Walking Dead should think again, because the season 2B trailer strongly suggests that these ideas will be more fully explored in the back half.
In the trailer, the man in the photo above walks from a bus into a crowd of walkers and sacrifices himself to the zombies as his daughter looks on. This is where season 2B is headed. In Mexico, the survivors are still trying to come to grips with the zombie apocalypse and square it with their Catholic faith. Mexico, after all, is home of El Día de los Muertos, the Mexican Day of the Dead. It is a national holiday where the dead come as spirits from another world to be with their living relatives. Here, the zombies house those spirits. Indeed, in Mexico, altars for the dead are prepared in anticipation of the arrival of their spirits, much like the altar Celia had outside of her home, overseen by an owl.
Expect in season 2B that Fear the Walking Dead will continue to embrace the dead. This is something that The Walking Dead hasn’t really done. The parent series treats zombies as lumbering monsters to fear. In trying to explore the nature of a zombie’s existence in Fear the Walking Dead, the characters may just stumble upon a discovery that may not only help them deal with the walkers, but better cope with the death of loved ones.
Either that, or everyone just ends up dead trying to ascribe meaning to a creature where there is none.
