Fear the Walking Dead is set to return this Sunday on AMC with the back half of the second season. When last we left the series, Fear the Walking Dead had concluded the midseason finale on a baffling cliffhanger that saw Nick (Frank Dillane) abandon his family to walk among the zombies. A few weeks after the midseason finale aired, the Fear showrunner offered a clue as to why Nick behaved the way he did:
“We connect something in the premiere of the back half. We find out he had something in his hand that we didn’t know about that makes him a little bit less insane than to just walk off.”
A quick inspection of the trailer for this Sunday night’s midseason premiere suggests that the “something” in Nick’s hand might be drugs:
This week, however, Dave Erickson may be suggesting that it may not be the drugs responsible for Nick’s behavior, but that the zombies themselves are Nick’s new drug of choice. From an interview with TVLine:
I don’t know if it’s craziness so much as an addiction — he’s found his replacement for heroin. I think that there’s an actual physiological reaction he gets when he’s walking among the dead. So it’s less that he’s lost his mind and more that he’s found his new fix.
Erickson continues, suggesting that Nick’s compulsion to be near the zombies is not only a way for him to get his adrenaline pumping, but also a way to reconnect with his dead father. “There is a logic to it,” Erickson says. “It’s a junkie logic, but it is a logic.”
That’s definitely a new twist in The Walking Dead universe. There have been characters who have gotten high on killing zombies (and Fear’s Chris is one of them), but we’ve never seen a character satisfy an addiction by hanging out with lethally dangerous dead people.
There’s clearly more to the story, as well, because in season 2b, Nick will also meet — and potentially fall in love with — a new character by the name of Luciana (Danay Garcia), who in turn introduces Nick to a pharmacist with a “mythical status” in his community. Maybe the pharmacist can prescribe Nick some methadone to wean him off his addiction to zombies.
This is Luciana, by the way, who is described as a “badass.”
Fear the Walking Dead returns on Sunday, August 21.
Source: TVLine
