Fear the Walking Dead returned with a flashback to its original walker and showrunner Dave Erickson explains why.
Warning: Spoilers for Fear the Walking Dead Season 2.
Fear the Walking Dead picked up its pieces after the fiery carnage and bountiful bloodbath in the May midseason finale. Indeed, the show began by picking up one of the more notable pieces with an episode centering on the Tijuana travails of the troubled Nick Clark (Frank Dillane). After leaving his family behind, Nick experienced some poignant past visions in the desert, notably centering on a love interest we had not seen since the series’ pilot – as a face-chewing walker.
In an interview with EW, showrunner Dave Erickson provides some valuable context to Fear’s Season 2 mid-season premiere, “Grotesque,” concerning Nick’s pre-zombie-apocalypse flashbacks concerning his late girlfriend Gloria (Lexi Johnson). Up to this point, Gloria was simply plot device meant to convey the show’s inciting incident in the very first scene of the Pilot where Nick awakens in the abandoned church where he went to shoot up heroin. Looking around the den for his presumed girlfriend Gloria, Nick finds her covered in blood, sporting milky white eyes and gnawing on someone’s face.
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However, with “Grotesque” giving us our first look at Gloria before that torrential turn, it was clear that her role in Nick’s undead vision quest, not only in his past flashbacks, but as a talking walker hallucination, played its part in explaining his often opaque motivations, as well as his relationship with his recently-ditched mother Madison (Kim Dickens). As Erickson explains of the return of Lexi Johnson’s role in a living context:
“It was fun. Lexi did a great job in the episode, and there’s two things going on for Nick. One is obviously that he feels he’s on a spiritual journey, and Madison would look at that differently. Madison would look at that as this is a new manifestation of Nick’s addiction. But the two things we wanted to explore on his journey, because we’re going to get into parallels to the Gloria story and to his father’s story of the absence of his father as we move through the season.”
Nick’s flashbacks reveal that Gloria – when not eating peoples’ faces and chasing him around junkie dens – was a fellow rehab case who was severely confused in life and her affections seemed rooted in a quixotic approach to fixing him. However, we saw Nick’s downward spiral accelerate when Madison told him about the death of his father in a car accident.
Thus, it became clear that Gloria’s affections and empathy for Nick tethered her to his fall down the depths of addition; something that eventually cost her life in a presumed overdose, resulting in her becoming Fear's presumed Patient Zero. It's also something that plays a part in Nick’s feelings of guilt in the present over the lives he (and his family) seem to destroy in their path, which was one of the reasons he left his family, blindly looking for answers elsewhere amongst the tranquility of the dead. As Erickson further explains:
“The flashbacks were really about tapping into the loss of Gloria in the sense of responsibility and culpability. He feels for that. Then also the idea of the absence of a dad.”
The specter of Nick’s relationship with his (never-shown) father – which was revealed to be distant – also became a key point to his unusual odyssey, since we learn that he’s looking for someone to fill the gaping personal chasm in his life that seeks guidance and acceptance. It was something he had with Gloria (despite leading her down the primrose path) and something he seemed to briefly achieve from his time with the walker-wrangling maternal figure Celia before the mid-season finale’s ensuing chaos. Consequently, Nick’s purported search for, as he says, “a place where the dead aren’t monsters,” is just the latest manifestation of both his search for a perpetual "fix" and a personal path of accountability for deaths such as Gloria's. In fact, as Lexi Johnson herself explains in a separate interview:
“I think Nick and Gloria’s story resonates with anyone who’s engaged in a relationship, because it’s about power and beauty and potential, whether slow or sudden, waking up and realizing the narrative has changed and it’s devastating, and you’re left wondering how much of a part you played in turning the person you loved most into a monster.”
Of course, by the end of “Grotesque,” Nick did find something when he was rescued from the brink of death (from dehydration and infected dog bites,) by survivors from the mysterious, seemingly-thriving settlement called Colonia with figures like the pharmacist/makeshift doctor Alejandro (Paul Calderon) and the beautiful badass Luciana (Danay Garcia). However, these seemingly happy scenarios tend to dissipate quite quickly in The Walking Dead universe and this new family that potentially fills Nick’s personal gaps clearly come with some unconventional caveats.
Fear the Walking Dead continues its Season 2B run on AMC on Sundays nights.
