This is not the Walking Dead you are used to. Fear the Walking Dead, the much awaited spin-off series to the original, finally premiered on AMC and although it is set before the events of TWD, it still manages to keep the story - as well as the newly turned Walkers - fresh.
But before we go any further, those who haven't watched the first episode of Fear the Walking Dead yet, better get on it, or continue reading below for the low-down on what went on in this exciting new show. Spoilers and some Walker action to be had below.
You have been warned.
As we mentioned, Fear the Walking Dead takes place prior to Rick Grimes waking up alone in his hospital bed in Atlanta, so we can witness the zombie apocalypse as it first begins to take hold. And what better setting to place it in than the every-busy glamorous streets of Los Angeles?
The opening scenes alone pay homage to the original The Walking Dead series, but also manage to ensure that audiences know that this is a completely new show. Nick, a druggie, awakens in an empty church and calls out for his friend, whom he got high with the night before.
He finds her... as she is eating the face of some other person. When she sees him, she stands up with a bloody knife in her chest and begins to pursue him. Nick runs out of the church and is then promptly hit by a car.
After the opening credits roll, we return to the show during what appears to be a typical day. Nick's family is back at home, preparing for the day, setting up the picture to contrast how terribly mundane and even nonsensical we talked about things before the zombie apocalypse hit - gluten free bread, broken pipes, etc...
Madison, Nick's Mother; Alicia, his sister; and Travis, his Stepfather, went to see him at the hospital where he has been restrained and is being interrogated by police officers trying to make a deal with him about where he scored his drugs, ignoring his ramblings of a face-eater in the church.
Madison gets the cops to leave and takes Alicia to school while Travis, who tried to get his own son to visit him over the weekend but ultimately, tells his ex-wife Liza to keep him, promises to find a treatment facility for Nick that hasn't blacklisted him yet.
Meanwhile, on the drive to school, Alicia shows that she is a typical annoying TV teen, who is also struggling with the weight of having a druggie brother. Madison wants Alicia to be positive but the teen only says that Nick will be ok as long as he's restrained.
In the school, another boy, Tobias, sets off the metal detectors but Madison intervenes and pretends the alarm was set off by change she had in her pocket. She takes Tobias aside and convinces him to give her the knife he was hiding, which he does, but only to cryptically make some remarks about "safety in numbers" and how no one will be going to college or doing what they thought they'd be doing for a long time.
Tobias also mentions some sort of virus but Madison tries to assure him that if there was anything wrong, the authorities would alert the public.
Oh how wrong you are, Madison. And what is it with foreboding teenagers who seem to know everything? The show might have been using it as a way to build up suspense, but since the audience already knows what's coming, it just seems redundant and, frankly, annoying.
Back at the hospital, Nick awakens with Travis by his bedside, who refuses to remove his restraints. Travis tells Nick that he probably hallucinated but Nick insists that what he saw was real. He tells Travis that his friend, Gloria, was eating everyone in the church. His fear seemed real enough that made Travis decide he has to look into it further and goes on to make the biggest horror movie/TV show mistake ever - he goes on to investigate the church. Alone. At night. With nothing but a flimsy flashlight.
What he finds in the old church is blood and guts. A lot of them, and a junkie screaming as he runs past him, "Don't kill me!"
The next day, Travis and Alicia pick up Madison from Nick's bedside where she spent the night to look after her son. As she changes her clothes, Alicia helps to feed Nick, who is still restrained. He then promises his sister that he will change, "I'm ending it now. I'm choosing to," he tells her.
Travis tells Madison about what he found at the church but Madison doesn't care to hear about what he saw and doesn't want to enable Nick. She dismisses the carnage Travis saw as a possible shoot-out from a drug deal gone wrong and says that Travis is only using Nick as a substitute because of his own strained relationship with his son.
At school, Alicia plans a night rendezvous with her boyfriend Matt and shares that she wants to get away next year for college. Although she genuinely shows real concern for her brother for the first time, it is clear that she's had enough of the stigma of being a druggie's sister.
And at the hospital, Nick has managed to convince a nurse to untie one of his hand restraints to relieve him in a bedpan. Beside him, an old man breathes heavily and goes into cardiac arrest. While the nurse rushes over to help him, Nick unties himself, steals the old man's belongings, and escapes the hospital.
When Madison and Travis return to the hospital, they are told that Nick left during the chaos while his roommate coded and another death occurred on the floor.
They decided to visit the initial scene so Madison can see for herself what Nick and Travis saw, but when they arrived, they saw pools of blood but no bodies. Convincing themselves that what they saw was simply the remains of a violent crime scene and nothing supernatural, they continued their search for Nick.
Unfortunately, their stop at Cal's -Nick's friend- house also turned out empty. They are told that Nick had been distancing himself from his normal group of friends for quite some time and Cal has not seen him for a while. Travis tries to comfort Madison, telling her that they'll find her son, but Madison has turned pessimistic and shares that even she is not sure if she wants him to come home.
Somewhere on the other side of town, Nick is alone and hiding under a bridge, using a prepaid card to call somebody who remains unknown. Meanwhile, Alicia is annoyed because she thinks Matt has stood her up for their romantic beach date. As she walks back home, she passes by a van with the word, "Awaken" ominously spray painted on it.
The next day at school, the principal thinks there must be some sort of flu virus outbreak since only five kids step off the morning bus. Inside the school, teachers are watching some videos from the news the night before people started attacking police officers and eating them even after they get shot at multiple times.
Madison realizes that the grisly scenes are exactly what Nick had been describing and calls Travis to try to notify the police of Nick's disappearance since it's the only way to find him and keep him safe.
But Nick is still somewhere in the city, stumbling around and searching for the friend he was trying to contact the night before.
Back at school, Alicia and her friends are being warned by their teacher that their phones will be confiscated as they watch the same violent footage that the teachers were watching earlier. At that moment, the principal's voice booms over the P.A. system to announce that classes will only be half day and everyone is advised to go immediately home.
Back to Nick, who is shown entering a restaurant where Cal, the person that lied to Madison and Travis because it was he who has been selling drugs to Nick all this time, is waiting for him.
Nick just wants to know what Cal gave him that made him hallucinate so badly and tries to tell him what he saw Gloria do at the church. Cal doesn't want to hear it and tells Nick it's not cool for his parents to randomly knock on his door to look for him. Nick assures him that he would never tell anyone what Cal really does. Cal feigns accepting his story and offers him another hit, which hooks Nick in again.
They drove off to an aqueduct where Nick thinks Cal will give him some drugs, but instead Cal pulls out a gun on him. In the struggle, Nick accidentally shoots Cal in the stomach. He runs away but as luck would have it, Madison and Travis find him crying at the side of the road.
He tells them that he shot Cal and they decided to go to Cal's car to see for themselves what happened. However, Cal's car is empty and the gun is still there. Confused and afraid he is hallucinating again, Nick breaks down even more.
As they are about to leave, they suddenly see Cal walking towards them. Madison and Travis try to approach him as Nick begs for them to just leave and not go near his former friend. It's too late, however, and they see the blood on his shorts as he tries to go after them and bite them.
Nick rescues them by running over Cal. To everyone's disbelief, Cal stands right up again despite the heavy impact of the truck. Nick slams into him again, causing his body to fall over the aqueduct. As the three of them look down, they are shocked to see his body still moving.
Whoa. That certainly was a jam-packed first episode! The 90-minute premiere for Fear the Walking Dead has raised the bar for the series and obviously is trying to set itself apart from its parent series but relying more on suspense techniques rather than blood and gore (although we will definitely still see a lot of it) to tell its story.
Now that the zombies are out in the open, we can't wait to see what will happen next when Fear the Walking Dead airs again next week on AMC.
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