When Fear the Walking Dead came to a temporary end for the midseason finale, the characters were at a crossroads both literal and figurative, with one left for dead and everyone else splintered off into factions. Nick, in particular, has a motive behind leaving the larger group behind, as he wants to get away from his mother and connect with others like Celia, who was killed by Madison. And according to showrunner Dave Erickson, the fruits of Nick's search just might lead to very bad things for him.
For Nick, he wants to find a place where people see the dead the way he does, where people see the dead not as a threat, not as a danger, but as an extension of themselves -- sort of an evolution. That's his goal. So, when he leaves, when he realizes Celia's gone, and the compound is burned, he's going to set out to find people who are more like-minded and will give him some clues along the way. And then it sort of falls into the be-careful-what-you-wish-for category. When he actually gets to a place with some degree of spiritual comfort for him. It's not going to last very long.
Uh ohhh. Nick has been known to make a terrible decisions on far more than one occasion, so it's no surprise at all that his against-the-grain view of the apocalypse is going to bite him in the ass. (Figuratively, not literally. Maybe.) I mean, Celia did have her good points as far as her little community went, but she also had a screw loose in several ways, so it was already unlikely that Nick would find a genuinely fantastic mentor as her follow-up. But at least she wasn't a direct danger to Nick himself, and the same might not apply to whatever new group he hooks up with.
If anyone can stumble upon a group of people who sympathize with walkers, it's Nick. (Or, if we're on The Walking Dead a couple of years ago, it's Lizzie.) I don't know how that meet-up gets started, outside of him wearing a sandwich-board that declares his views on the undead population. But however that goes, we're more interested in seeing the climax of that situation, in which viewers are clued in on whatever warped and sadistic trait shared by everyone else. Nick should probably learn to just listen to his elders.
I mean, Alicia JUST did that whole "blindly trusting others for no discernibly intelligent reason" thing earlier this season when she led that pack of douchebags to Strand's boat. She's supposedly learned from that mistake, so one would assume Nick would have learned before he even made it. I guess it's good he gets some spiritual comfort, as Erickson told EW, but it won't do him any good if it gets him killed.
And here I thought Nick was going to take on a leadership role like Rick soon. (Well, Rick did lead people to Terminus.) Find out what will happen when Fear the Walking Dead returns for the rest of Season 2 on Sunday, August 21, on AMC.
