‘Fear the Walking Dead’ Recap, Season Finale: Blood and Soil

Fear the Walking Dead ended its second season with a finale spread across two episodes, entitled “Wrath” and “North” respectively. Here are some things that happened in them.

• Reunited with Maddie after his abandonment by his violent son Chris, Travis laments that he broke his promise to the boy’s late mother to keep him safe. “In this world, this new world, where the rules are different and always changing, that’s exactly what you did,” Maddie reassures him. “He’s safer with people who understand him.” In Fear the Walking Dead, the physical safety of yourself and your in-group is all that matters. The idea that there’s such a thing as moral safety, that Chris’s mother might feel his conscience should have been kept safe as well, is not present.

• Not that it matters, because Chris falls asleep at the wheel and shatters his leg in the ensuing accident, so the “people who understand him” murder him.

• In an attempt to barter for the safety of the Colonia where he’s found a home and love in the form of Lucia, a woman who’d previously left him to die, Nick brings a supply of oxycontin to Marco, the ganglord who provides the Colonia with its water. In order to show Nick how futile this gesture is, Marco directs him to a secluded area of their warehouse headquarters, where he finds the dead bodies of the mother, father, and little girl Marco shot to death for no reason.

• Not that it matters, because the moment Marco and his gang invade the vacated colony, its dying leader Alejandro sets loose the zombies who’d formed an undead moat of protection around the village, killing Marco and all his men.

• Brandon and Derek, Chris’s murderers, wind up at the hotel where Maddie and company are staying. Here they spew racial epithets at their Mexican neighbors until, in an effort to cover up Chris’s death so that the news won’t break Travis’s spirit, Maddie attempts to throw them out. Travis stops her and learns that Chris died in a car crash. But a slip of the tongue by Derek indicates there’s more to it than that, so Travis tortures Brandon until he finds out the truth: They shot Chris to death to keep his wound from slowing them down. Travis then beats both men to death.

• Despite the fact that he killed Brandon and Derek by smashing their heads in, both of them come back to life as zombies, requiring them be stabbed in the head several minutes later.

• Despite the fact that the room is enclosed almost entirely in easily breakable glass windows, neither Maddie, who spends the fight saying “Travis, stop” at roughly the level of volume and intensity I use to tell my daughter not to dribble juice on the couch, nor anyone else thinks to break the glass to break up the fight until after it’s over, at which point they seize Travis for breaking Maddie’s rule that no one can lay a hand on anyone else in the hotel.

• Not that it matters, because Maddie immediately tells him it was the right thing to do. “I’m not sorry,” he tells her while under house arrest by the hotel’s other residents. “You shouldn’t be,” she responds. “They deserved it.” She goes on to detail her own cold-blooded murder of Celia, the “zombies aren’t really dead” cultist Maddie fed to her own infected so that Nick wouldn’t become one of her disciples. “I understand what you did, why you did it, and I’ll understand when you do it again. Because you will. You’ll have to. We will have to.” With this they hold each other against the night sky, their love for one another cemented by the certainty that murder is a practical inevitability and a moral necessity, one they will gladly share.

• During his murder of Brandon and Derek, Travis badly wounds Oscar, the newlywed groom whose wedding reception marked the beginning of the hotel’s zombie outbreak way back when. His brother, a doctor, cuts into his skull to alleviate the swelling in his brain. All of this is shown in graphic detail.

• Not that it matters, because Oscar dies. His brother and Hector, the hotel employee who’d previously been complicit in locking Oscar’s family up to die but who is now apparently his comrade in arms, immediately set out to murder Travis.

• Not that it matters, because Alicia murders the brother in turn.

• Alicia, Maddie, and Travis are saved from murder at the hands of Hector and the other outraged hoteliers by Victor Strand, who chases them off with a gun.

• Not that it matters, because Strand gives the gun up and stays behind as Alicia, Maddie, and Travis escape.

• They travel to Marco’s now-abandoned warehouse HQ, where they inspect the bodies of the murdered mother, father, and little girl in order to find an address for the Colonia where Maddie believes Nick is living. Why they think these people’s drivers licenses will reflect where they currently live considering Maddie, Travis, and Alicia lived in Los Angeles and are now in Mexico is not explained.

• Not that it matters, because when they arrive at the Colonia it’s been abandoned, and Marco’s forces have been slaughtered by the zombies. Alicia, however, finds Alejandro, who has not yet died, and he tells Maddie Nick headed for the border before finally expiring, at which point Maddie puts a knife through his ear. In a way this brings her closer to Nick, her son, who earlier killed a zombie by jamming his thumbs into its eyesockets for several seconds.

• Not that it matters, since zombies overran the compound anyway.

• And not that it matters that Nick’s gone to the border, because he and the massive group of innocent men, women, and children he leaves there are immediately shot at by what look to be racist American Minutemen border-patrol types of the sort who’d intercepted the Manawa-Clark clan’s former associate Ofelia in the first half of the finale.

• Not that depicting border-patrol racists as racist matters, since earlier in the episode Marco and his men screamed words like “cucarachas” and “muchachos” and fired their guns in the air while whooping and yipping in celebration like an army of Frito Banditos.

• Not that any single fucking thing on this show matters, because we know what the outcome and the moral will be every single fucking time. Kindness is always weakness, brutality is always morality, outsiders are always animals, and at a certain point everyone will try to kill everyone else, so you’re never wrong to kill first.

Fear the Walking Dead is fascist.

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Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, the Observer, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.