Nick Clark (Frank Dillane) enjoys long walks in the desert, the color red and hanging with his peeps as they dine. Photo Credit: Richard Foreman/AMC
A flashback shows us Nick Clark (Frank Dillane) with his girlfriend Gloria (Lexi Johnson), who joined Team Z in the first episode. Photo Credit: Richard Foreman /AMC
Today’s weather: Hot, with a 100 percent chance of zombie herd. Nick Clark (Frank Dillane) is behind the bald walker. Photo Credit: Richard Foreman/AMC
By Andrew A. Smith
Tribune Content Agency
If you’re on the fence about AMC’s Fear the Walking Dead, the mid-season premiere Aug. 21 didn’t give you a lot to work with. But maybe it was just enough.
“Grotesque” was the first episode since May 22, when the central characters from the West Coast version of The Walking Dead splintered into three parts. The main group consists of Maddie Clark and her daughter Alicia, the enigmatic Victor Strand and the recently orphaned Ofelia Salazar. Travis Manawa and his unstable son Chris form a second splinter.
The third part is only Maddie’s son Nick Clark (Frank Dillane), who was a heroin junkie before the apocalypse and still operates with a junkie’s mentality despite the lack of drugs. Perhaps because of that (and his resemblance to a young Johnny Depp), the writers opted to make this episode about him and him only – Maddie only appears (briefly) in flashback, and the other main characters don’t appear at all.
Or maybe it’s because the critics just love Nick. Forbes.com calls him "one of the show’s best characters." He is “the most interesting character,” according to Gizmodo.com. And Vanityfair.com gushes, “There is … one truly unique player in this familiar game of gore and rot. And that would be Frank Dillane’s Nick, who has been one of the series’ most charismatic characters since the beginning.”
And while I agree that Nick is a pretty interesting character, I find myself a bit frustrated with him at times.
For one thing, the writers have come up with the idea that Nick’s life on the streets as a junkie made him a survivor, one well suited to this new world. He’s not afraid of death, he tells Strand, because he flirted with it every time he shot up. That’s a pretty canny insight on the part of the writers.
But they’ve gone overboard, making Nick such a Superman that maybe all the other characters should give heroin a try, just to catch up. Strand calls Nick “the gold standard of junkies” – as if such a thing exists – and whenever the plot needs a prod, it’s Nick who does something dangerous, unpredictable and often implausible to move things along.
Need to find out what happened to a shot-up boat at sea? Nick conveniently finds a captain’s log in a plastic bag in the water while looking for drugs. Need to reveal a new group of survivors’ dark secret? Let Nick find it hidden in a hollow globe while looking for drugs. Need to make contact with a guy in zombie-infested territory? Send in Nick, who discovers he can disguise himself with zombie guts while … well, I don’t think he was looking for drugs. It was never really explained why he agreed to do this.
And his situation in “Grotesque” is inexplicable. At the end of “Shiva,” the mid-season finale back on May 22, Nick opted to leave the central group of survivors to join a herd of the undead, safe as long as his zombie-innards disguise holds up. He thinks his mother’s group are the real monsters, and to be fair, they have pretty much destroyed every sanctuary they’ve been a part of so far.
Also, Nick has indicated that he’s feeling a little invincible these days. “I didn’t feel fear,” he tells Maddie about coming face to face with a walker for the first time. “I didn’t feel hate. I just knew I wasn’t going to die. Not there, not that way. I move among them, Mom. Invisible. I will not die.”
Again, interesting stuff. But the decision to give up the food, water and protection of a group to hang with zombies isn’t interesting. It’s insane.
And, of course, it’s potentially lethal. In his wanderings, Nick is attacked by zombies, shot at by thugs, gets dehydrated in the desert, drinks his own urine and is bitten by dogs. But, because he has what fans call “plot armor,” he survives. Only to tell the guy who patches up his dog bite: “I want to be where the dead aren’t monsters.”
Dude. Nick. Can I call you Nick? Look, Nick: Undead, flesh-eating creatures not found in nature are, by definition, “monsters.” Get a grip, dude.
But maybe it’s not his fault. Maybe it’s the writers. Dave Erickson, the showrunner and an executive producer, tossed around terms like “spiritual journey” and “finding himself” when referring to this lunatic walkabout on the TV show Talking Dead.
“Nick is really challenging the universe in a strange way,” Erickson told Entertainment Weekly. “He’s challenging the apocalypse, and I think from his perspective if he can survive this journey then he can survive anything.”
Nope, still don’t believe it. Try again.
“In this world, Nick’s choice is defensible,” said Nick Vegna of the Wall Street Journal. “Anybody who actually lived through the horrors of a global pandemic, societal collapse and nightmare of the living, flesh-ravenous dead would almost certainly have their sanity shredded in short order. That’s quite a gift to hand to a writer, because it means they can justify virtually anything their characters do with this rationale. So far the writers seem to be using it judiciously. Nick’s actions are extreme, but not entirely unbelievable.”
Closer. Try again.
“He’s found his replacement for heroin,” Erickson told TVline.com.” I think that there’s an actual physiological reaction he gets when he’s walking among the dead. So it’s less that he’s lost his mind and more that he’s found his new fix. … He’s always had a very close relationship with death, largely because of the death of his own father. It’s almost like, from an emotional standpoint, this closeness to death is a way to try to reconnect with his father. … There is a logic to it. It’s a junkie logic, but it is a logic.”
OK, “junkie logic.” I can buy that.
And I need to. Because Nick really is the most interesting character, and Dillane possible the best actor on the show, now that the character played by Ruben Blades is dead (well, for now). Most of the other personalities and relationships on the show, whether due to poor scripts or mediocre acting, haven’t been as compelling. And all those characters are coming back next week.
So let’s hope the Nick-centric show has done its job to convince us of this world. Fear the Walking Dead had record-setting numbers when it debuted, and it has already been approved for a third season. But as TheVerge.com reminds us, ratings have steadily trended downward, with “the mid-season finale pulling in less than half of the viewers that the show snagged in its initial debut.”
So pull on your cape one more time, Nick. This is a job for Super-junkie.
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