‘Fear the Walking Dead’ Recap: ‘Not You... Just Us’

Warning: This recap for the “Cobalt” episode of Fear the Walking Dead contains storyline and character spoilers.

With just one episode remaining in Season 1, the civilians have just learned the military’s plan for them — the titular “Cobalt” — and it ain’t pretty. Even worse: They have less than 24 hours to make an alternative plan and put it into action, lest they become part of what one new character calls “the buffet.” That should mean a killer (so, so literally) Season 1 finale, and here’s how they got to this place:

Meet Strand

And this is what happened to Nick and Doug Thompson: They’ve been put in a cage, inside some sort of facility patrolled by military personnel. There are many giant cages arranged in the room, and this one also contains a man named Strand, a fast talker wearing a sharp suit, who seems determined, with a paltry amount of effort, to drive fragile Doug Thompson completely over the edge.

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All it takes is a few verbal jabs at Doug about how he isn’t at home to take care of his family, about how, looking at Doug’s photo of “Mrs. Doug,” it’s clear she has a body that’s “the ticket to help her latch on to the kind of man that’s going to help her through all this.” Doug nosedives into meltdown mode, and military guards take him away. To somewhere.

“So, then, who the hell are you?” Strand asks, turning his attention to Nick.

The Bait

Ofelia Salazar is at the gate at the entrance of the neighborhood safe zone, and she’s throwing a hissy, tossing rocks and yelling at the soldiers, demanding information about her mother. They’re about to take action, which probably means taking her away, when Adams — the soldier who’s been crushing on her — arrives. He calms her down, and offers to escort her back to Madison’s. She agrees. Because… trickery.

Daniel Salazar has a plan to get Griselda and Nick back, and Adams is part of that plan. Rather, Adams is the plan. Daniel asks Ofelia to get her friend back to the house, so he can grill him about where Griselda is and what the military’s plans are. Ofelia thinks that’s the extent of her father’s intentions, but it’s not; Daniel brought his barber kit with him when he and Travis’s family fled the barbershop downtown. It’s got a big razor in it, and he’s going to use it to convince Adams to drop some scoop. One word: flaying.

It’s a bloody, bloody job, but Daniel — who tells Adams he’s done it before, during war times in his native El Salvador — does it well. Madison resists at first, but he convinces her to cosign his efforts, and he finds out from Adams where Griselda and Nick are, and what, exactly, “Cobalt” means. It’s a term Daniel hears repeated often on Adams’s radio, so he knows it’s important.

R.I.P., Moyers

Travis has a different plan for retrieving the gang’s loved ones: He’s going to talk to Lt. Moyers. Moyers says he can’t help; it’s up to Dr. Exner. “Fine, how do I talk to her?” Travis asks. Moyers: “You don’t.”

Moyers tries to brush Travis off, telling him how his priority is to keep his young, inexperienced soldiers from freaking out as the apocalypse rolls on. But Travis, having seen those gun flashes in the house on the hill, and having seen Nick dragged away, is no longer imbibing from the pitcher of Moyers-flavored Kool-Aid. If Moyers doesn’t help him get the info he’s seeking, he says, the rest of the safety zone is going to get antsy and come down to the gate, which will not be good for the morale of Moyers’s soldiers. It’s not a threat, Travis continues. “I’m just being… helpful,” he tells Moyers, repeating the compliment Moyers had paid him earlier.

Moyers decides to take Travis to see Exner — or says he will — and, along with two other soldiers, he and Travis head out of the safety zone in a Humvee. After a pit stop to kill an infected, and a failed attempt to make Travis shoot a turned donut-shop waitress, the tank of men continue on towards a meeting with Exner, until an emergency call on the radio sends them to a building where a group of infected are loose.

All the men with guns run in, telling Travis to stay in the vehicle. He hears gunfire and screams and commotion on the Humvee radio, and sees a soldier fall out a window. When two of the men, minus Moyers, come running out and hop in the vehicle to flee, Travis asks where Moyers is. He’s not coming out, Travis is told. And Travis is being taken back near the safety zone, while the surviving soldiers, no longer under Moyers’s control, are fleeing back to their families.

Liza and Exner

With just a couple of nurses to help her take care of a facility full of sick people — i.e. those with the potential to turn — Exner has put Liza into action at the military facility. The doctor tells Liza they had to amputate Griselda’s foot, but keeps her so busy that she doesn’t get a chance to go find Daniel’s wife. A wounded soldier is brought into the hospital, and Exner begins to treat him when she notices he has a bite mark. “Corman, we got another one,” she yells to a nearby man, who grabs an air tank.

Elsewhere in the compound, at the cages, guards go around taking the temperatures of those locked up. Strand is fine, but when they aim the temp gun at Nick, it reads 101.1. They take him out of the cage and start to drag him away, until Strand offers the head guard a pair of diamond cufflinks to add to the fancy watch he’s already given him in another bargain. The guard, Melvin, has Nick returned to the cage, and Nick asks Strand why he saved him.

“No, I obligated you. There’s a difference,” Strand says. “I look at you, and I see someone who knows the meaning of necessity.”

Nick: “I’m an addict.”

“No, you’re a heroin addict. That’s the gold standard; don’t sell yourself short. The soldiers are leaving. I’m going to require a man of your talents when I make my move,” Strand tells him, showing him a key he has hidden in his hand.

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Meanwhile, Liza has finally gotten a chance to sneak away to try to locate Griselda, which she does, in an isolated area of the compound. But she’s nearly too late. Griselda has septic shock, Exner says, and she’s not going to make it. “Sometimes all we can do isn’t enough,” Exner says.

Griselda begins to chatter as Exner figures out her brain is swelling, and death is imminent. “I saw the devil’s face … it was the same as yours,” Griselda says in Spanish, clearly angry at someone from her past, presumably her violent past in El Salvador. She continues on angrily before suddenly gasping her last breath, prompting Corman to bring that tank over to her bed. It’s a captive bolt pistol, to be used, Exner tells Liza, before Griselda can turn. Liza takes the gun from her, and puts Griselda to rest by her hand.

Cobalt

Travis returns to Madison’s house to find a distraught Ofelia on the lawn. She’s just discovered her dad’s full plan for Adams, and saw him in full flaying action. Travis charges into the house with just one question for Madison: “Did you know what he was gonna do? Tell me you didn’t know!”

In the basement of Susan’s house, where Daniel has set up his torture chamber, Adams continues to spill his guts, telling Daniel about an arena nearby where two thousand people — some infected, some not — spun out of control, trampling each other to get out. He and the other soldiers in charge couldn’t tell the healthy from the infected, so they shut all two thousand inside, and chained the doors shut. “I can still hear ‘em,” he says.

Travis and Madison burst into the room, with Travis intending to stop Daniel’s torture session, until Daniel urges Adams to share with them the truth about Cobalt.

“Cobalt is a command code to initiate evacuation from the L.A. base,” Adams says.

“When? When do we leave?” Travis asks.

“Not you. Just us,” Adams says. “Cobalt includes procedures for the humane termination of…”

“When?” Travis asks, as it’s already late in the day.

Adams: “0900, tomorrow.”

Later that night, Daniel is outside, as Humvees rush by. He walks up steps that lead to some chained doors. As he gets closer, the doors rattle, and he hears lots of loud groans. Someone, two thousand someones, are just waiting to come out.

Infectious Info:

* It’s official after this episode, and the just-concluded third season of Showtime’s Ray Donovan: Two of the biggest badasses on TV this season are Rubén Blades, age 67, and Jon Voight, age 76.

* When Chris and Alicia are trying on clothes and destroying property in a rando act of rebellion at the “rich people” house, Chris doesn’t turn away so quickly — and Alicia doesn’t ask him to — when he catches a glimpse of her putting on a dress. Could this Brady Bunch-ian scenario be headed the way of those famous Marcia/Greg off-screen hookups from the Bunch production days?

* The late guy-we-love-to-hate Moyers was played to perfection by Jamie McShane, who TV fans may also recognize — or not, because he’s that good at switching up his performances — as Sons of Anarchy’s Cameron Hayes and Eric O’Bannon on Netflix’s Bloodline. Stellar year in TV land for him.

OK, Dead-heads, let’s hear your reactions to “Cobalt,” the penultimate episode of Season 1: Did you love the reveal of Daniel’s background in the war? Do you think Travis is finally ready to admit he’s going to have to do some ugly things to survive? And can the group come up with a plan to save themselves before 9 a.m.? Bigger question: When Daniel and Ofelia find out their beloved Griselda is dead, will they even continue to fight to survive? And what are the odds we see Apocalypse Whisperer Tobias in next week’s finale?

Fear the Walking Dead airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on AMC.