Yahoo TV had just interviewed Fear the Walking Dead show runner Dave Erickson, who had seen the Season 2 Mid season Premier and gave his report.WARNING : SPOILERS AHEAD
The Interview (YT as Yahoo TV and DE as Dave Erickson)
YT: You’ve been saying since the series began that Nick’s (Frank Dillane) experiences as a drug addict have made him better equipped to maneuver the post-apocalyptic world than some of his family and friends. The ‘Fear the Walking Dead’ mid season premiere, which is one of the best episodes of the series so far, really illustrates that.
DE said : “It does. I mean, yeah, I think Nick has always lived on the fringes. He’s used to living hand to mouth. I think what’s interesting… he makes a very bold statement in the mid season finale. He essentially tells his mother that he can’t die. I think the scary thing for Madison is that he seems to feel more connected to the dead than he does the living. That’s a big part of the reason why she acquaints his fascination, fixation with the dead with his addiction to heroin. It’s a big part of the reason why Madison disposed of Celia [in the mid season finale], because she saw her as a pusher.”
The reason we do flashbacks in [the mid season premiere] is… Nick clearly is getting his fix from the dead. There is an adrenaline rush and there is a connection, and I do think it’s feeding his addictive personality, but he’s also very simply lost. He lost his father. I think part of what he’s looking for in that connection with the dead and then part of why he — it’s a short-lived father/son relationship, but his attraction to that friendship between him and Strand — is he’s a kid who lost his dad and really felt as though he’d lost his dad even before his father died. He felt that his father was suffering from depression and was disconnected, and I think that has a lot to do with… I think his addiction pre-existed that, but I also think it definitely pushed it further down the road. I think that’s something real. It’s not just about rubbing shoulders with the dead, it’s really about something that’s missing in him that he’s still trying to find. He will suffer for it and be undone by it as the story plays out. At the end of the day, what he’s going to realize, I think, is it’s better to walk with the living than it is to walk with the dead.
But, yes, we see he can survive very well post-apocalypse.
YT : No specific spoilers, but this episode really is Nick’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. He kind of had everything thrown at him that could be.
DE: It’s almost his, it’s our shortened version of The Revenant, putting him through all of that… you’ll see a degree of recklessness to him in subsequent episodes as well. He does have this attitude of his confidence, in the sense of invulnerability, and I think that in this world, that has to be short-lived. I think it was, you put him through these trials, he still survives and wins. He succeeds, he lands in the place that he set off to find. Then it becomes a question of, how do we start to tarnish that to a degree?…
Read the whole interview here: Interview with Dave Erickson and Yahoo TV
Frank Dillane as Nick Clark
(Credit: Richard Foreman Jr/AMC)
Monday Monday’s Analysis
It is not a complete surprise that AMC’s Fear the Walking Dead is choosing to come back and focus on the guy who has been the most elusive and also the first person we meet in Episode 1 Season 1. A drug addict that wakes up in what appears to be some weird Zombie Apocalypse.
It is also pretty amazing how he figures out how to blend in and survive fast. Unlike his long distant cousins on the East Coast who seem to take months to learn some of the basic survival principles, Nick picks up and runs with.
Frank Dillane as Nick Clark 
