“Fear the Walking Dead” follows the blended Clark family as they experience the beginning of the zombie outbreak. Madison is the cool school counselor who actually wants to help kids and isnt burned out or jaded. Son Nick is a drug addict, whom Madison is desperate to help, even if he doesnt want help. Daughter Alicia is a high school junior who cant wait until she can leave for college. Madisons live-in boyfriend, Travis Manawa, is a highly-regarded literature teacher at Madisons school, and desperately wants the kids to like him, if only because he cant repair the damaged relationship he has with his own teenage son, Chris.
The pilot episode opens with Nick waking up from a heroin nod in an abandoned church now used as a shooting gallery. The girl he was getting high with, Gloria, is nowhere to be seen, so Nick goes looking for her. Along the way, he finds at least one junkie dead. He finally finds Gloria, a butcher knife in her chest, who is eating the face of another junkie. Horrified, Nick rushes from the drug den, into the street, where he is hit by a car. Since the plague hasnt truly begun yet, there are plenty of people around to help.
Madison, Travis, and Alicia rush to meet Nick at the hospital. He has been missing for a few days, and Madison is relieved to find him alive. Nick has been ranting about a junkie eating another junkies face. The cops think it is just the drugs. Travis stays with him while Madison goes to work, and the two men kinda-sorta-almost bond.
At school, a lot of kids are out sick. Madison catches Tobias try to sneak in with a knife. She protects him from the principal, but when questioned about it, Tobias doesnt want to say why he has the knife. All he will say is, It is safer in numbers and that they dont know if it is a virus or what. Apparently people in five states have come down with whatever this disease is. Madison is sure that if it was something to be worried about, the authorities would have issued a warning.
That night, Travis goes back to the drug den to investigate Nicks claims. He finds a terrified – but alive – junkie, and an enormous puddle of gore. He reports back to Madison, and admits he believes Nicks story. Madison dismisses it, and accuses Travis of being an enabler. Nick, who hasnt had a fix in two days, is making promises that he wants to quit this time.
Without his family there, Nick sweet talks a nurse into undoing one of his restraints so he can use the bed pan more efficiently. She leaves him and Nick wastes no time in freeing himself. Before he can escape, the old man in the next bed starts to code, and chaos erupts. The nurses and doctor are too busy to pay any attention to Nick, making his escape from the hospital – in the old mans clothing – an easy one.
Madison is nearly hysterical when she discovers her son is gone. She doesnt want to call the cops, so she and Travis go looking for him. They try the abandoned church, which horrifies Madison and makes her wonder if Nick really is a lost cause. They check with an old friend of Nicks, Cal, who hasnt seen him in awhile. They finally give up and head home for the night. The freeway offramp is blocked due to police activity. Not unusual for Los Angeles, but the enormous police presence and circling helicopters make it suspicious. Travis pulls back onto the freeway and goes a different route home. By the time Travis, Madison, and Alicia get to school, they discover the reason for the police activity, thanks to a leaked cell phone video. A car accident yielded fatalities, but the dead man woke and started eating the paramedic. Cops started to beat the man, to no avail. They spray him with bullets, but the dude keeps advancing. A kill shot to the head is the only thing that takes him down. Staff seems to think this is drug-related; Alicia thinks the video is a fake. The more immediate concern, at least for the principal, is that only five kids were bussed into school today. By directive of the school board, the school was going to have a half-day. In this universe, that means the school closes immediately and people rush from the premises.
Nick has spent the last 24 hours or so trying to reach his dealer on a burner phone. He finally gets his dealer to meet him at a diner, and it turns out it is Cal, the friend who swore he stopped hanging out with Nick ever since he started doing drugs. Suddenly the sweet, helpful kid is all gangsta, and worried that Nick ratted him out. He swears he didnt, and that the reason he wanted to see Cal was to find out what he cut his heroin with. Cal didnt cut it, and Nick doesnt know what to do with this information. If it wasnt the drugs, then that means what he saw was real – or he is crazy. Crazy seems far more likely, and it scares the hell out of Nick.
Cal promises to take care of Nick and insinuates he will get him his fix. They drive out to a ravine, and Nick waits in the car while Cal goes to his trunk. Cal tries to pull Nick from the car, but he sees the gun. The two struggle, the gun goes off, and Cal is dead. Nick freaks and runs. He calls Travis and has him pick him up under an overpass. He is mad that Madison came with him, but quickly dissolves into tears and admits what happened. The three of them drive back to the ravine to find Cals body – but it is gone. Nick is confused and terrified. Whatever strands of sanity he still had have long since snapped. They get back into the car and start to drive back through the tunnel, when they see Cal. He is lurching towards the car strangely, and Travis and Madison get out to help him. Of course, Cal tries to eat them, and the adults push him away. Nick runs him over with the truck, and is surprised when that doesnt kill him. He races at Cal at full-speed, then stops short, sending Cal flying across the pavement. Nick, Madison and Travis approach the corpse, and find Cal broken – but still moving. What the hell is happening here? Madison questions.
“Fear the Walking Dead” started off really, really slow. It picked up towards the end, but it was a slow slog getting there. “Fear” chooses a template similar to The Walking Dead: following a family as they experience the zombie outbreak for the first time. While “Fear” chooses a different time frame – the first days of the plague – it still is the same basic model. I think I would rather follow the plague from patient zero. I know that Robert Kirkman has always said that he doesnt want to reveal the source of the virus, and that is fine, but the nerd in me wants to see the CDC track the disease from the first incident.
As per usual with pilots, I try to reserve full judgement for a few episodes. The characters, while they werent instantly annoying, also didnt grab me. They are cookie-cutters, generic characters that represent types, with the drug-addled son being an easy way to let the outbreak affect the main characters while still giving them plausible deniability.
In “Fear,” the zombies are all fresh-faced. There is no sign of decay. This is understandable because everyone has just freshly turned. But in “Walking Dead,” even people who die from a non-zombie death seem to be decayed the moment they return from the dead. So how does that work out? Is it that, in “Walking Dead,” we have had a few years with the outbreak, and the zombie virus that people are carrying decays even as you are alive? So that when the virus finally takes you over, you are getting three+ years of decay with it? Thats the only explanation I can think of.
You can watch a clip from the second episode, titled “So Close, Yet So Far,” as well as a bonus clip from the first episode, below.
