‘Fear and the Walking Dead’ season 2, episode 8 reaction: On Nick’s new community
The midseason premiere of “Fear the Walking Dead,” otherwise known as an episode geared entirely around Nick, was an emotional journey just as much as a physical one. Through most of his life, what we’d learned about Nick is that this is a character who has constantly tried to find a place in which he belongs. In the past, he had that for a time in Gloria; she couldn’t cure him of his addictions, but she at least understood them. At Celia’s compound, he found a little of that common ground before it was gone.
By the time we made it to the end of tonight’s episode, we decided that Nick may have discovered a new community for himself, one where the dead are not feared and where there are people trying to function as they did before the apocalypse. This was meant to be a happy reveal, but at the same time, this is not a world where happy endings abound. This is something that executive producer Dave Erickson cautioned further in an interview with Entertainment Weekly:
“This is one of the most joyful moments on the show, and it’s probably going to be the last. Look, in some respects that’s a moment of that’s the reward for the journey, and what he’s found is a group who much in the same vein as Celia, they do not see the dead as monsters. They embrace the apocalypse and they see it as more of an evolution. It’s not apocalypse for them. We’ll get into their belief system in the sense of the religious aspect of it as we move forward, but yeah, for that particular moment it is exactly what Nick was hoping to find, and yes, ultimately nothing ends well in Fear or in The Walking Dead. So it’s a taste of joy before the fall.”
Nick does have a group within this group now courtesy of Luciana, but we cannot imagine that he will remain there without the likes of Madison and Alicia for lock. What would this show be if the entire ensemble was not linked in some way?
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