In The Season 2B Premiere Of ‘Fear The Walking Dead,’ Nick’s Thirst Leads To A Bear Grylls Moment

Feeding a Monster

As the episode opens, Nick calmly rises from a night of sleep, unfazed by the death around him. It’s clear that Nick is the only character in the entire The Walking Dead universe so chill about zombies that he can fall asleep next to a couple of corpses — formerly friends of Sofia/Nurse Ratched — and not blink an eye when he wakes up in a halo of swarming flies and the smell of rot. For Nick, it’s another day that ends in Y. Where is Nick? I’m not sure, but he’s been fraternizing with Thomas Abigail’s old nurse, who has decided to take a child and go look for his dad, because even in a zombie apocalypse, the importance of a father figure can’t be overstated. “There are too many orphans,” she tells the guy who just abandoned his family to go live with dead people. The kid, meanwhile, is happily playing with a soccer ball, like you do after your entire village has burned to the ground and zombies are overrunning the rest of Mexico.

Sofia hands Nick a backpack, points yonder, and basically offers him the same advice Charles De Mar gave Lane Meyer in Better Off Dead: “Go that way really fast. If something gets in your way, turn.” Nick’s leaves with a José González (the Swedish Nick Drake) song on his mind, a hop in his step, and a full gallon of water, which should be plenty to get him through a 50-mile walk through the desert.

Fear the Walking Dead is back, folks, and its logic is still on the questionable side.

I’ll Live While I’m Alive, and Sleep with the Dead

Nick’s first night on his sojourn across the desert doesn’t go well. He falls asleep in what he thinks is an abandoned house, only to wake up with a screaming woman swinging a bat at him. No wonder he prefers the company of walkers. Poor Nick is chased away before he can grab his water, and he’s still got miles to go before he drinks.

Some guys would probably hop into one of the literally hundreds of abandoned cars littered along the highway and drive to Tijuana, but the next morning, Nick’s got a date with a walker, who he teases inside a parked car for a few minutes without letting her get to first base. No matter, the date is eventually interrupted by some random men, La Maña, who have nothing better to do than drive up and down the freeway looking for walkers to kill. Nick escapes a barrage of their bullets, but these guys will be back. Angry-looking men with assault weapons and no motivation to kill whatsoever always come back.

Act II: Nick is Thirsty

For the next half hour of the episode, Nick continues to walk. And walk. And walk, as Fear is now taking its cues from Gus Van Sant’s Gerry. He does stop and attempt to extract water from a cactus, but that National Geographic special apparently lied to him because there’s nothing inside but barely wet cactus guts that leave Nick retching. Nick, in turn, does what any of us would do in his situation: He pees into his hands and drinks his own urine. That’s a baller Bear Grylls move.

Dog Guts

Next time Nick falls asleep, he wakes up to wild dogs barking in his face. They get a chunk out of Nick’s leg before he climbs on top of an abandoned van and watches the dogs attack a horde of walkers. Spoiler: The dogs lose.

However, a car horn distracts the walkers long enough for Nick to climb off the van and rush over and eat the dog remains. Eating dog guts poses an interesting wrinkle to The Walking Dead mythology. Remember when Gareth ate Bob’s leg in The Walking Dead, and Bob — who was infected — grinned like he’d pulled one over on Gareth? We never found out if Gareth could get infected from Bob’s tainted leg because Gareth was killed soon after, but this seems to answer the question in the negative. Apparently, you can’t get infected from eating other mammals who have been eaten by walkers.

Update your mythology notebooks accordingly.

Walks with Zombies

After drinking his own urine and eating the remains of a dog carcass, Nick loses his damn mind and joins a crowd of walkers for a lazy afternoon stroll through the desert. He continues hobbling down the freeway until he’s met by the bad men with guns again. They start shooting indiscriminately at the zombie horde, but “Hector” drops his bullets, and the walkers overrun him and two of his compatriots too stupid to run when approached by a slow moving mass of death dealers.

Afterwards, Nick falls behind the horde and succumbs to dehydration. He collapses onto the middle of the highway. The next time he wakes up, however, he is not confronted with a woman with a bat or dogs, but rain. The rain not only slakes his thirst, but completely washes away four days of caked-on blood on his T-shirt.

Before the rain

After the rain

Flashback

As the series did with Strand in the first half of the season, it looks like the back half will continue to incorporate Lost-like flashbacks. Here, they take us back to a critical time in Nick’s life — his first stead in rehab — where he’s involved with a “Type A” addict who is coaching him on how to confront his father, a guy who is always tired and depressed. Viewers may recognize Nick’s girlfriend as the series’ first ever zombie.

Nick probably regrets his hypothetical angry conversation with his father because in the next flashback, Madison visits Nick in rehab to tell him that Nick’s father died in a car accident. Nick’s only response is a low moan and some unfortunate overacting.

In the final flashback, Nick — now a heavy drug user — is back in the same church where the series began with the girlfriend who will turn the next morning. How was she infected? There’s a suggestion that she was infected by a tainted needle, which would be insane considering Nick was able to avoid infection even after eating infected dogs.

Luciano

Finally, Nick makes it to a village where Luciano (Danay Garcia) — who had spotted Nick walking with the dead earlier in the episode and left him to die — stumbles upon Nick again and introduces him to her father, a pharmacist. He patches Nick up and calls him a fool. “Death is not to be feared, but it shouldn’t be pursued,” he says. The pharmacist introduces Nick to their village, where “the dead aren’t monsters.” Nick ends the episode by walking into town like he’s finally found a home. The zombie lovers are his people!

Conclusion

Not a great episode. I appreciate that Dave Erickson tried to shake things up by devoting an entire episode to one character and using flashbacks to provide backstory, but watching Nick walk through the desert for an hour isn’t the way to kick off season 2b. The episode seemed to want to present itself as artful, but the approach — the lack of dialogue, the reference to Sherwood Anderson’s Book of the Grotesque, and the attempt to draw comparisons between Nick’s drug addiction to his obsession with walkers — comes off as heavy-handed, pretentious and completely out of character for the series. We learn more about Nick’s past, but there’s no coherent through line from that past to the reckless, apathetic, and suicidal man who cavorts with the zombie that Nick has become in the post-apocalyptic world. Most damning for a series trying to hang on to viewers who are already on the fence, “Grotesque” is tedious in the way that the worst Darabont episodes of The Walking Dead often were.

To its credit, Fear did try to do something different, and tying the episode back to the pilot through the use of flashbacks was clever. Moreover, the episode does present some interesting possibilities for Nick’s character. Through 14 episodes, however, Fear has not instilled in us any confidence that it will be able to honor the potential in the back half of the season. With little else airing on Sunday nights for the next month, however, Fear should benefit from being the only game in town.