Nick, waking up. Definitely a call back to the very first episode when he woke up in the drug house/church. He stretches, and looks around. He’s in a room with a couple of dead people. But of course. I’m not sure where he is, somewhere on Celia’s estate that didn’t burn? Someplace nearby? The nurse from Celia’s walks inside the room. Nick looks out the open front door and sees a boy playing with a ball. Nick asks her where she’s going. She’s going south, and Nick should go with her, she says. She sits down and asks him if he’s going to follow them. I think she means the walkers. She says there is talk of other safer places, but there are bandits out there, and they’re dangerous. The nurse is looking for the boy’s father. “If he’s out there he (Juan, the boy) deserves to find him.” Nick gazes toward the corpses on the floor.
Outside, a little later, Nick plays with the boy. He really does have a good rapport with kids. The nurse points the highway out to him, she gives him some water, and a small backpack of supplies. They hug and she kisses him on the forehead. He hugs Juan, and then the nurse Juan get in the car and drive off, leaving Nick behind. Nick goes back inside for a moment and then heads out. He surveys the land, the mountains and boulders. He’s covered in walker guts again, thanks to the corpses on the floor. He walks alone along a path with his pack, and his laughably insufficient jug of water. As he walks along the highway we see a sign for Tijuana – 100 miles to go. He keeps walking.
Credits – with only the sound of wind, no music.
Nick keeps walking and sees a car crash. It looks nasty, a head on crash. He looks in the window of one of the cars and sees nothing. He has a flashback. He’s thumb wrestling with a girl. It looks like Gloria, the walker in the drug church from episode one. They’re discussing his drug dealing, and he doesn’t want to say bad things about his parents to get a get out of jail free card. Both of them have been in rehab and it looks like they’re both going to get released, and maybe sooner if Nick is willing to badmouth his parents, as Gloria suggests. She asks if there is something he wants to say to her in role playing mode – they start to role play. Nick doesn’t want to, he says his dad wouldn’t hurt a fly, and his mom has degrees in counseling and stuff. After a bit of prodding, he finally starts with how his dad is always tired when he gets home from work. And then we get to the truth: Nick was looking for guidance from his dad, like how to act like a man, but not getting any of this from his dad. His dad would listen, but he wasn’t really present. He’s a little more vehement than he probably meant to be. Gloria gives Nick a hug.
Back to present day, dusk now. Nick walks up to a house. He peers into the porch area and then inside. It looks completely empty, and there is little furniture. Looks like he’s going to camp inside. He makes a fire inside, and drinks some water from his jug. It’s quiet, too quiet.
Stock full-moon image.
And someone walks up to the house. Too stealthy to be a walker, and whoever it is has a bat. What is it with The Walking Dead and bats? It’s a rhetorical question. (eye roll) It’s a couple of girls, and they hit him. They yell at him in Spanish, but he can’t understand them, and they continue to hit him. Maybe it was their place. Actually it looks like a young mom and her daughter. Walker or human intruder, Nick’s a threat. Finally Nick is able to run/limp away.
Daytime again, and Nick is walking along the highway, with no pack and no water, due to his hasty escape from last night. He sees a walker in a car, and reaches out to touch her. He takes her water bottle. She doesn’t really try to attack him, then again, she’s seat-belted in and can’t do much. Just sort of rote attack, much snarling, but no action. He looks in the car again and reaches into it to take a portable radio. He tests it to see if its working. He’s finding only static as he changes stations. He looks up to see a lone walker approach, as well as a jeep with some men in it. He hides from the bunch of them. The men kill the walker, and begin to look around at the mess of wrecked cars. They’re scavenging, and look to generally be up to no good. They say ‘we have a live one’. There’s an old man alive in a car, begging for help, but they kill him, and seem to enjoy it. Nick is horrified watching this all go down, and at that moment, the radio blares out some more static. Yay. Nick runs off, while the bandits shoot at him. They keep shooting and chasing him, and he continues to run through the tall brush, grasses, and bushes, which provide him with some cover. He stops to catch his breath when it seems he isn’t being chased any longer. He looks around and takes a deep breath and looks around. In front of him is the vast openness of the land. He continues to walk. We see an aerial shot of him. He is very, very alone.
Nick is breathing heavily among the cacti. I think he’s remembering that there’s liquid in cactus. He touches it, but the barbs are too sharp. He takes off his shirt to use it to break apart pieces of cactus. He tries to get a few drops of liquid from the cactus, but he gets nothing. He pounds it with a rock and is able to get some of the meat from the cactus. Looks kind of gross, and sure enough, Nick begins to retch. He falls onto the ground. He’s got to get water somehow. He thinks for a moment, and then unzips his pants – he’s going to drink his pee. And he does. Ew ew ew. Well, I guess you have to survive somehow.
Close to dark now, and he’s approaching an abandoned car, shivering from the cold, and he’s only wearing a t-shirt. How long do walker guts last on a body?
Back to his flashback. I’m not sure where they are, police are present, but there are little side rooms too. Gloria’s parents arrive. Criminal court? Police station? Madison shows up, and Nick gets up to greet her. Nick tells Gloria ‘good luck’. A social worker-type says that Nick and his mom will meet in private for a few moments. Nick says to Madison, ‘no dad?’ Madison says he’s not coming. Madison says his dad was in a head on collision on his way home. So that’s why the head on crash on the road to Tijuana triggered Nick. In the flashback Madison is crying, and says Nick’s dad didn’t make it. She touches Nick, but he moves away from her. She looks sad, but not as sad as I might expect. Maybe she was expecting something like this to happen with Nick’s dad?
Gloria goes off with her parents. But she hears Nick scream and looks in the door to see what’s happening with Nick and Madison.
In the present time, it’s daytime again and a dog is barking at Nick. It looks like a German Shepard. It attacks and bites him. He bashes it with a rock, and then he tries to climb up onto the roof of a rusted out van/SUV-type vehicle. I wonder how long it was out there? Certainly well before the apocalypse. The German Shepard tries to follow Nick up to the roof. Nick has been bitten fairly badly. With all of the barking, the dogs have alerted all of their walker friends, who all turn toward Nick and the dogs. The dogs move to attack the walkers, but of course the walkers don’t care. They keep walking. The walkers overwhelm the dogs and eat them. Nick watches from the roof, horrified.
The soon beats down on Nick while he’s on the roof of the car. The walkers are moving off, until he fiddles with his leg, which causes the roof to squeak, and they turn toward him. They’re almost to him. A whole horde. He’s hurt badly enough that he won’t be able to jump down and run away, so he clasps his hands together and begins to pray.
All of a sudden there is a car horn honking and the sound of gun fire. It’s probably those bandit guys who were shooting at Nick earlier. It’s a fair amount of noise. All of that noise lures the walkers away. Nick looks up to try to see if he can see what’s going on. He sees the carcass of one of the dogs and limps over to it. He eats some of the dog guts. Not Nick’s best adventure ever. Then a crawling walker slithers toward Nick. Nick wrangles him, getting on top of him, and takes the walker’s belt. The rest of the walkers are going in another direction and now that Nick has fresh guts, he falls in line with them.
Nick’s in fairly poor shape as he shambles among the walkers and he’s kind of dizzy, and not seeing clearly. He looks like he’s fading in and out. He sees all of their faces but they’re all blurry. He hallucinates them talking to him about home. He sees a blond walker who says ‘I’ll take you home’, but when he looks back at her, he can see that he hallucinated it. The blond walker could have been a more decayed version of Gloria, not really sure.
They all keep walking, and they’re back on the highway. Tijuana is now only 40 miles away. The walkers and Nick crest the hill as they walk along the highway. He sees another jeep approach the mob. It’s the same jeep with the same guys! I guess they just like killing walkers. The guys get out of the jeep and walk toward the walkers, laugh, taunt the walkers, and begin to shoot them. Nick keeps walking with them. Many walkers fall as they are shot. It’s sheer luck that Nick isn’t shot. One of the men from the jeep sees Nick and looks surprised. Does he recognize Nick from before? I think so because he’s kind of freaked out, and drops his bullets. The guys in the jeep tell the guy to come along, but he persists trying to gather up his bullets and load his gun. He ends up getting bitten and then ripped apart. The big guy is next to get bitten and eaten. Only one guy drives off. Nick watches as the two men are pulled apart. The mob of walkers keeps walking, as does Nick. Nick’s limping pretty badly by now.
Nick is being watched through binoculars by three people who also wear walker blood as camouflage. They can tell Nick’s not a walker. Luciana tells Francisco ‘it isn’t him’. One of the men with Luciana wants to help Nick as they see Nick fall to the ground. The man comments that Nick is dying. Nick is flat on the asphalt. He looks like he’s finally at his end.
Flashback to Nick and Gloria. He’s reading a book from his dad. Gloria is wondering what it’s about. He says ‘grotesques’. Please explain, asks Gloria. He says it’s when you hold onto something for too long, you corrupt it. They’re in the drug house from season one. They’re doing drugs, probably heroin. Much drug paraphernalia. Graffiti covers the walls, and they are up on the platform where Madison found the book, the foil, and the blankets. And the book is probably the one that Madison found on his makeshift bed. The flashback is probably not all that long before the events of the very first episode. Gloria says maybe she’ll read it. Nick says, ‘you should’. Gloria says, ‘in the morning’. Hmm, I don’t think so, since she’ll be dead by then. I like how we’re getting to see some of the pre-apocalypse lead up.
Nighttime and it’s raining on Nick. He’s still flat on his back on the highway, but now he’s looking mighty clean. No more walker guts on him, and he’s overjoyed by the water. He probably won’t die of dehydration now.
Daytime. Nick is in horrible shape, but he’s made it to a deserted town, the sounds are some barking dogs. It’s fairly large so it must be Tijuana, or at least the outskirts. He sees a drug store and limps toward it – he needs to take care of his leg. He really is limping much like walkers limp. Everything is all pretty picked over. After making much too much noise in there he goes back outside and wanders around. He goes inside another darkened place. He finds some duct tape and begins to tape up his leg. There’s someone in the door. It’s Luciana and her people. He puts his hands up. Nick says it’s a dog bite, not a walker bite. He asks for water. The man gives him a water bottle. Luciana says (in Spanish) I know someone who can help you. Let’s go. Vamanos. He’s now in a doctor’s office, hard to know what it was before. A man comes down a spiral stair case and gets Nick to sit down. He looks at the bite, and tells him in English that he’s going to cut away his trousers. Nick looks on warily. The man says he’s sorry, and that Nick is on the edge of infection. He puts antiseptic on the wound. The man says Luciana says Nick is brave, but he sees Nick as foolish. Death is not to be feared, but not pursued. He smiles and tells Nick he will recover. The man says that Nick was walking with the dead. Nick says there is safety in numbers and that it’s safer than walking with the men with all the guns. The man wants to know why Nick came all this way. Nick says he wants to be where the dead aren’t monsters. The man looks unamused.
The man opens the door so that Nick can see a community – a very alive and vibrant community. People casually wandering around. He sees Luciana. Nick can’t believe what he’s seeing. They have a wall of sorts that protects them, and the inside looks like a bazaar. He kicks a ball to some kids and smiles. Aerial shot, it’s a good sized camp on a hill. Kind of like Hilltop from Walking Dead. Hmmmm. This place might be too good to be true.