Though Fear the Walking Dead began with the initial embers of the zombie apocalypse, by season’s end, the characters had pretty much accepted that civilization was in the toilet. That’s a long way to go across six episodes, but when the show makes its return on April 10, we’ll be getting a nice 15-episode chunk that will allow the creative team to jump right into the action. And in The Walking Dead world, this means new characters and probably the deaths of a few regular characters in short order.
(Definite spoiler alerts below if you haven’t watched the full first season…)
When we left off with our Los Angeles group of desperate survivors, they were all headed for mystery rich dude Victor Strand’s yacht. Well, everyone except for Liza who had her boarding pass revoked when it was revealed she’d been bit. (Sorry, Liza, those are the rules, R.I.P.) It’s been six months since we last saw the group, so here’s a quick refresher on the lucky ones who made it off the mainland.
Madison Clark (Kim Dickens)
Girlfriend of Travis Manawa and mother of Alicia and Nick, Madison started off the season trying to get help for her Nick, a drug addict. But priorities obviously shifted pretty quickly. Madison escaped the first season without suffering the loss of any loved ones, but endured the trauma of her first walker kill being her friend and boss, principal Artie. The season finale wrapped with Madison recognizing that Travis’ ex-wife Liza had been bitten and following her out to the seaside cliffs. It’s there that Liza asked a hesitant Madison to shoot her so that she doesn’t turn. As Liza pled with Madison to pull the trigger so her ex-husband doesn’t have to, Travis shows up anyway and finishes the job. Seeing how overwhelmed he is by what he’s just done, Madison follows him down to the beach to comfort him.
Travis Manawa (Cliff Curtis)
The show’s central male protagonist, a potential Rick Grimes in-training, Travis spent the first season mostly resistant to what was happening around him and struggling to keep the threads of human decency together. We saw Travis attempt to console freaked-out neighbor and family man Doug — though poor Doug still ended up a goner — and work as a liaison with the soldiers, only to discover their sinister intentions. With “The Good Man,” though, Travis finally took off the nice guy gloves, beating a solider that Daniel had been keeping hostage after he betrayed Travis’ word to free him and shot Ofelia. It was a serious change from the man who had been hesitant to shoot a walker in previous episodes, and it wouldn’t even be his final “man up” moment in the show’s finale. That of course comes when he’s forced to put a bullet in the head of his ex-wife after it’s discovered she was bitten during the escape from the Guard base. We’ll likely see a change in Travis’ personality and leadership in the second season as he copes with the trauma of having to kill the mother of his son.
Nick Clark (Frank Dillane)
The show’s first character to have a run-in with the undead, Nick stumbles upon a walker in the drug den he’s holed up in during the show’s pilot episode and takes off running faster than any heroin addict has ever moved. By the time the show’s finale rolled around, Nick had somewhat sobered up and made an ally with Victor Strand, while being held in quarantine at the Guard base. Nick and Victor make their escape, running past trapped civilians and dying soldiers as Daniel’s herd of arena walkers descend on the base. After an incredibly narrow escape, thanks to Liza’s key card, Victor and Nick meet up with Madison and the others and flee to Victor’s MTV Cribs-worthy mansion. It’s there that Victor show’s Nick his plan for fleeing infected Los Angeles with a yacht that looks like it’s straight out of Jay-Z’s “Big Pimpin'” video. Nick’s screentime wraps with him telling his mother that he feels like everyone is finally catching up to the world he’s been living. An overstatement sure, but also an implication that he’ll have an easy adjustment doing as Victor said and “embrace the madness.”
Alicia Clark (Alycia Debnam-Carey)
The more level-headed of Madison’s children, Alicia’s already suffered a loss in the form of her boyfriend Matt, but takes some comfort in the bond she’s formed with her stepbrother, Chris. The season ended with both Alicia and Chris guarding the escape car while her mother and Travis went off to find Nick amid the chaos. While waiting for their parents to return, Alicia shows that she’s more prepared than Chris with the changes this new world brings, telling her stepbrother “you can’t save everyone.” (Girl isn’t afraid to drop some truth bombs.) It’s then that one of the soldiers smashes the car window and makes a move on Alicia before Chris steps in to defend her honor, suffering a nasty beating in the process.
Ofelia Salazar (Mercedes Mason)
We didn’t get to know Ofelia quiet as well as some of the other survivors during the first season, but what we do know is that she’s a first-generation Salvadoran-American and protective of her parents. Also, dating for her must have sucked as a teenager. When her mother becomes ill, Ofelia sparks up a relationship with Andy, one of the soldiers, and asks him about procuring some medicine. One episode later and Andy is tied up in her father’s garage and being tortured for information about the Guard’s plans. She’s noticeably distraught by her father’s actions, and becomes even more hysterical once she learns that her mother, who was supposedly receiving medical treatment at the base, has passed away and is told by Liza that there’s nothing left of her amid the zombie chaos. During the group’s escape in the base parking garage she is confronted by an angry Andy who threatens to shoot her father, but shoots her in the shoulder instead. While she doesn’t appear to be on the brink of death at Victor’s house, things on the show tend to go from bad to terrible pretty quickly, so her immediate fate could still be undetermined.
Christopher Manawa (Lorenzo James Henrie)
The youngest survivor in the group, Christopher is Travis’ and Liza’s smart, but incredibly rebellious and bull-headed son. He begins documenting the odd activity that’s starting to happen around Los Angeles almost immediately and is largely responsible for getting the family trapped in the city’s riots after attending a protest. He has a close friendship with his stepsister, Alicia, and comes to her defense in the parking garage in the first season finale when a soldier asks for the truck’s keys and tries to lure Alicia away. He suffers a beating in the process, getting knocked out, but wakes up just in time to watch his dad pummel Andy into a pulp after shooting Ofelia. Once the group makes it back to the beach house he appears to breathe a sigh of relief and takes a moment to enjoy the view and a popsicle with Alicia. The beach fun is pretty short-lived though, once he hears the gunshot of his mother being put down.
Daniel Salazar (Rubén Blades)
Fear The Walking Dead might not have a Daryl Dixon just yet, but Daniel Salazar could be a Daryl in the making. Actually, come to think of it, he’s probably more of a Merle because of the whole torturing Andy thing. He’s the one adult in the group who doesn’t trust the military from the get-go and tells Madison of the horrors he witnessed the military commit during the Salvadoran Civil War in the 1980s. When it doesn’t appear that he’ll be able to trade his prisoner Andy for his wife Griselda he opts for plan B: lead 2,000 walkers from the sports arena to the Guard base. He tries to comfort his daughter Ofelia after learning that his wife didn’t survive, and later tends to her gunshot wound at Victor’s mansion. He and Travis hardly ever saw eye-to-eye during this first season and given his pull-no-punches attitude, it’s likely their relationship will become even more tense on the boat.
Victor Strand (Colman Domingo)
While Nick may have been a screw-up for much of the first season, he made up for it big time by making friendly with Victor Strand. We don’t know much about Victor, except that he’s loaded, has expensive taste in jewelry and has a baller mansion and rescue yacht waiting in the harbor. He seems levelheaded and cunning in the way he bargains with the soldiers holding him and Nick prisoner, all the while plotting his escape. He and Nick nearly didn’t make it out of the base after being trapped between a locked door and small herd of walkers in the final episode, and if it weren’t for Liza showing up at the last-minute, he would have been a goner for sure. Being that he’s the group’s only hope for survival at the moment, we can probably expect him to have a much bigger role in the new season.
