More walkers are now a part of pop culture. Fear the Walking Dead season 1 premiered Sunday night and jumped straight into the action.
‘Fear the Walking Dead’s’ premiere: A brief overview
Even though Fear the Walking Dead is set at the very beginning of the outbreak, it wastes no time in warning of a threat. The cold open finds Nick (Frank Dillane), the son of Madison (Kim Dickens), waking up in a deserted church after his latest drug trip and discovering that his friend Gloria has gone missing. He eventually finds her and she is, as far as we know, the first person to seemingly catch the infection.
Nick bolts out of the church in a panic and gets himself hit by a car, leaving him in the hospital.
The show quickly establishes the lead characters and their connections to one another. Madison, the mother figure, is romantically involved with Travis (Cliff Curtis), and together they’re raising Nick and his sister Alicia.
We also meet Travis’ family, including his ex-wife/partner Liza (Elizabeth Rodriguez) and their son Chris (Lorenzo James Henrie). While the patriarch gets along fine with his former love, he appears to have a rocky relationship with their son. Apparently Chris and Nick have bad blood too — the former makes it clear that he isn’t interested in spending time with Madison’s son.
The best character: Nick
The standout character in our opinion is Nick — He’s going to be a compelling person to watch throughout the season. Signs of his issues quickly surface in the premiere: He has a bad relationship with Travis, he’s been restrained at the hospital, and he’s been expelled from school. Oh, and that little drug problem. It sounds like he’s tried to get clean multiple times, but every attempt has failed.
Another problem of Nick’s is his own sister Alicia, who’s leaving for college soon (or maybe not now that this infection has occurred). We see her spend a little time with her boyfriend Matt, but these two don’t seem like significant characters. We’ve got money on either Alicia or Matt biting the bullet in the first season.
The darkness cometh
The premiere lived up to the expectations set by The Walking Dead, but it took a little while to get to the darkest material of the episode. One of the eeriest scenes comes halfway through the 90-minute opener when there’s a situation on the freeway: Cops are trying to kill someone who refuses to die.
The third act of the premiere finds Madison and Travis looking for Nick, including a visit to the church he lives in. After the search of the place of worship yields no results, they go to his friend Cal’s house.
Spooked by the arrival of Nick’s parents, Cal tracks down Nick and yells at him for potentially telling his parents about the drugs. It’s in this scene where Nick begins to shine. Frank Dillane escalates the character’s instability as he tries to figure out what he saw during his drug trip — was what he saw caused by the drugs or was it real? — causing a delicious performance.
It’s because of this manic attitude that Cal determines Nick is too unstable and decides he has to die — a dark thought considering the zombie apocalypse hasn’t even started.
Cal brings Nick to Los Angeles’ man-made river (kinda too open of a place to kill a person, don’t you think?), but Nick catches on, pulls the weapon on his dealer, and kills him.
In a panic and now more unstable than ever, Nick finally gets in contact with his parents and brings them to the river. Calvin has become a walker — the first one we’ve seen turn due to being killed (something we see all too often in The Walking Dead).
They try to kill Calvin and he. won’t. die.
What did you think of the series premiere?
Fear the Walking Dead’s premiere makes you think about how careless mistakes could’ve left a lot of people getting bit accidentally. We can’t wait to see how the confusion and mayhem plays out across the city of Los Angeles over the next few weeks.
One of the most interesting aspects of the episode was seeing how some people already accepted that there was true danger afoot. For example, a student at Madison’s school named Tobias is already quite confident that something bad has happened.
Unfortunately, Fear the Walking Dead didn’t answer what the cause of the original outbreak was. Maybe this companion series will shed a little more light on the subject. Or is AMC saving that for their next spinoff series?
Tease: Next week, one of the characters we met in this week’s episode will be suffering a most unfortunate death. Who do you think it is?
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