That’s what I think Fear the Walking Dead is about: they’re all potential Negans in the making. At quick glance Fear could be a rehash of The Walking Dead, but it’s not. This group isn’t becoming a West Coast version of Rick’s group. This is a story about how a normal group of people turn into the bad guys – Negan, The Governor, the group at Terminus.
In season one of Fear the Walking Dead many commentators and bloggers (myself included) have stated that they have a difficult time caring for these people, and don’t connect with them. There’s a reason for that. Most of the characters are morally ambiguous.
- We watched Madison severely beat Nick when she realized that he lied to her about quitting drugs, and it seemed like this wasn’t the first time this has happened.
- Nick, a heroin addict, contributed to the overdose death of his girlfriend, Gloria. Then he killed his dealer, Calvin, in self-defense, but it was a situation of his own making. He also siphoned off morphine from a dying man’s IV drip.
- Daniel was a torturer before the apocalypse, and a torturer after. Daniel also released a couple thousand ‘infected’, and then led them Pied Piper-style to the National Guard look-out post, causing the deaths of everyone at that post.
- Strand refused to rescue people from their military cages, heartlessly stating there was no ‘value add’ in doing so.
They didn’t get any better in the second season.
- Madison’s preferred solution to threats is still violence. Celia was a threat, so when opportunity came knocking, Madison locked her in a wine cellar filled with ‘the infected’.
- Daniel went a little nuts and set a fire in the Flores/Abigail wine cellar, causing the whole compound to burn to the ground.
- Chris went way off the deep end: he killed Reed and then lied about the circumstances. He hovered over Madison and Alicia with a knife while they were sleeping. Who knows what he would have done if the gunshot hadn’t awakened everyone. He killed a farmer in cold blood. Finally, he enjoys killing infected maybe a little too much.
- Nick has been mostly benign during the second season, being only indirectly responsible for the deaths of two people, possibly three. Thanks to his discovery of the ‘power pills’, Willa, the little girl, was able to find and eat hers, and then die (they were poisoned pills). Willa’s death in turn caused the death of her mom, and possibly her dad.
- Strand cut the raft loose from the Abigail, leaving Jake and Alex adrift in the ocean, probably to die of starvation and dehydration.
- Alicia didn’t hesitate to kill Andrés as he was about to shoot Travis. We can argue about whether it was a form of self-defense, but Andrés only threatened Travis after Travis accidentally killed his brother Oscar in a fit of rage.
- Travis beat Brandon and Derek to death when he found out they killed his son, Chris. Oscar, trying to prevent the beating deaths, ended up being killed by Travis.
Of the original cast members, the only one who has not killed anyone is Ofelia, although she is developing a callousness to her when she’s forced to kill an ‘infected’. It’s reminiscent of Carol’s annoyance when confronting, and killing, walkers in the later episodes of the Walking Dead. We’ll see how Ofelia’s callousness translates into her interactions with humans in Season Three.
Contrast that with the first two seasons of The Walking Dead. In that show the vast majority of characters started out positive, trying to do the right thing in a world where the old rules no longer applied. We rooted for them as they tried to ‘just survive somehow’. Yes, there were exceptions (Carol’s abusive husband, Ed, or Daryl’s brother, Merle) but Rick, Glenn, Dale, Hershel, Beth, Maggie, and the rest, were all ‘good’ people trying to do the right things – even if they didn’t truly apprehend the situation. I’m looking at you, Hershel – you and your barn.
It’s still the early days of the apocalypse in Fear the Walking Dead, and these characters are already making choices that cause the deaths of others who aren’t in their group. It’s easy to justify each individual choice and decision on its own, but each bad choice leads them further down the path toward Negan-hood. If they continue making ‘ends justify the means’ decisions, we’ll see how otherwise everyday people become the Negans or Governors in the Walking Dead universe.