'Fear the Walking Dead' Recap: 'I Really Don't Want to Be Insane'

Warning: This recap of the series premiere of Fear the Walking Dead contains storyline and character spoilers.

Part family drama, part apocalyptic thriller, the Fear the Walking Dead premiere shed light on what is about to become a society-shattering event, and introduced us to the dysfunctional blended family whose lives are about to get unimaginably more complicated than even their anti-Brady Bunch existence would have suggested. Let’s meet the Clark/Manawa fam!

Brother Nick

Our shepherd into the world of FTWD is Nick, a community college dropout who’s waking up after a binge at an abandoned church that’s also a popular drug den. As he stumbles around — with the sort of jerky movements that make him look like a, well, you know — he happens upon a dead, bloody body, and realizes something is amiss.

Related: ‘Fear the Walking Dead’: Showrunner Dave Erickson on What to Expect in Season 1 (and 2) 

He continues to try to find his friend and fellow junkie Gloria, and when he spots her crouched over another body, his relief is short-lived when she turns around and he sees she was noshing on that other body. And when she looks at him with her cloudy, glassy eyes and blood-covered face, Nick snaps out of his shock quickly enough to run barefoot down what a cop will later call “Needle Alley” and into a palm tree-lined Los Angeles street.

Where a car slams right into him.

Mom Madison, Sister Alicia, and Madison’s Boyfriend Travis

Meanwhile, a chaotic morning in the household of high school guidance counselor Madison Clark reveals this: Her daughter Alicia is running late and eats gluten-free; Madison’s boyfriend, divorced high school English teacher Travis Manawa, is trying to save $300 by repairing the kitchen sink himself; and all three have clearly been expecting and dreading the phone call that’s coming through.

Which sends them to the hospital, where Nick is in a bed — delusional, the doctor tells Madison — after having run into traffic, ranting, and requiring restraints in his hospital bed. Madison begins peppering the doc with questions that make it clear she’s been in this scenario before, and after shooing the cops away, she gets a flip explanation from Nick about what happened.

“L.A. is not a pedestrian-friendly city,” he says, as Madison begins efforts to find him a spot in a local rehab center, which prompts protests from Nick and sparks a family squabble that further sheds light on Nick’s longtime drug use, its effects on his mom and sister, and Travis’s precarious place in the Clark kids’ lives.

“Aren’t you glad you moved in?” Alicia asks Travis.

And there’s Travis’s side of that blended family: a call from his ex-wife, Liza, who tells him their teen son, Chris, doesn’t want to keep their appointment for a weekend visit. Chris tells Travis himself that he doesn’t see Nick as a friend or a brother, and he has no desire to spend his weekend with any of the Clarks, or Travis. And the Liza/Madison friendship? Doesn’t exist.

Time-sensitive responsibilities to her students send Madison off to school, with Alicia, while Travis hangs with Nick. Nick is downplaying his current state to his mom, but despite his ambivalence towards Travis as stepfather material, he trusts him enough to spill the truth about what he saw at the church — namely, his friend Gloria eating another human being and looking to him as her next course.

Travis assures him he’s having nightmares, and that the psych eval that’s been ordered will shed some light on what’s really going on. Nick’s got a bigger-picture concern: “I don’t know if what I saw came out of the [drugs], and if it didn’t come from the powder, then it came out of me, my mind,” he says. “And if that came out of me, then I’m insane, Travis. I really don’t want to be insane.”

Travis has a hunch that Nick’s not insane, and goes to the church to investigate. After running into a terrified guy who begs for his life, Travis trips and falls into a pile of blood and guts. He reports what he saw to Madison. “Something really bad happened there,” he says, but she says he’s just enabling Nick, and substituting repairing his relationship with Chris with trying to help Nick.

Escape!

With what he saw and his own questions about his mental state weighing on him, Nick charms a nurse into releasing one of his restraints, and while the staff is preoccupied with an emergency, he slips out of his bed, swipes another patient’s clothes, and flees the hospital. He buys a cell phone and immediately calls his friend Calvin, begging him to return his call. Meanwhile, Maddie and Travis find out Nick lammed it, and visit Calvin to ask for help.

Calvin, it turns out, is not Nick’s friend. He’s his dealer, and Nick is so desperate to meet up with him because he wants to know exactly what kind of drugs Calvin gave him before the incident that has him questioning his sanity.

Related: ‘Fear the Walking Dead’ Pilot Director: The Art of Embracing the Shadows and Building Tension 

Calvin meets Nick at a diner, and is only concerned that Nick has told anyone who he really is. Nick swears he hasn’t, and only wants to know if the drugs he took included PCP. Calvin is angry that Nick questions his product, and tries to calm a crying Nick down by taking him for a drive. Cal steers them towards a viaduct, and forces Nick from the car with a gun from his trunk. Nick spots the weapon and tries to wrest the gun away, but it goes off and Calvin is shot. Nick thinks he’s killed him.

Nick sits shaking and holding a cigarette when Travis, who he’d called, shows up with Maddie. He tells them what happened, but when they look at the crime scene, Calvin’s car is there, but his body isn’t. With all three of them pretty much convinced that Nick’s prognosis is looking more and more like insanity, they climb into Travis’s truck and begin backing out of the viaduct.

And then they see him: Calvin, or what we zombie-aware know as a turned Calvin, staggering towards them. Travis and Maggie get out of the truck and approach him, but when Nick sees Calvin trying to take a bite of his mom, he revs up the engine and plows the truck into him.

Calvin gets up again. And Nick, once again, revs the engine and drives right into Calvin, this time carrying his body to the edge of the drive, where it flies off the hood and down into the viaduct.

Maddie, Travis, and Nick walk to the edge to look at Calvin’s body. It’s bloody, battered, and still moving. Despite bones jutting out of his skin and a face with half of his mouth missing, he’s still moving, turning his head to train his cloudy, glassy eyes on them.

“What the hell’s happening?” Maddie asks.

Travis: “I have no idea.”

But there’s good news: At least Nick isn’t insane!

Well, maybe you have to really look for the upside.

Infectious Info:

* Tobias, Maddie’s student who tried to warn her that something super scary is about to happen to the world, prompting her response that he needs to spend less time online… he’s an instant favorite, right? And how sorry is she going to be that she blew him off as some sort of conspiracy theorist?

* Berkeley-bound Alicia’s boyfriend, Matt, seems very devoted to her and not the type of guy who would stand her up. So the fact that he failed to show for their date at the beach… that can’t be good.

* An intense series opener was in serious need of some moments of levity, like the one where Madison walks into a room to find Principal Art hunched over in a chair, with eerie, foreboding music as a soundtrack. Who else was certain Art was going to turn around and greet Madison in a zombified state? (He didn’t, but nice tease).

* Nick’s retro literary choice, the book Madison found at the church: Sherwood Anderson’s 1919 short story cycle/novel, Winesburg, Ohio.

OK, Dead-heads, let’s hear your reactions to Fear the Walking Dead: Does it live up to the hype? Which characters do you love and hate already? Is Nick, played by Harry Potter alum Frank Dillane, the series’s breakout star? Who, among the characters we’ve met so far, is most and least likely to survive when the full-on apocalypse hits? Why do you think Matt didn’t show up for his beach date with Alicia? And are you already hooked enough to commit to the rest of the six-episode first season?

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