Fear the Walking Dead
Season 1 Episode 3 “The Dog”
Directed by Adam Davidson
Written by Jack LoGiudice
Starring Kim Dickens, Cliff Curtis, Frank Dillane, Alycia Debnam-Carey, Lorenzo James Henrie, Elizabeth Rodriguez, Ruben Blades, Mercedes Mason, Patricia Reyes Spindola
AMC
Air Date: Sunday, September 13, 2015, 9pm

Fear the Walking Dead Episode 3, “The Dog,” brings us to the halfway point of this very short first season of the original AMC drama. This inaugural season is set in Los Angeles in the time leading up to the great zombie apocalypse that wiped out most of humanity, as seen in The Walking Dead. So far, our lead characters have seen firsthand those who have been infected by the zombie virus, but they don’t yet know what the ramifications are.

In the previous episode, we saw a few instances of people who were inflected by something “” presumed by most to merely be the flu “” but the infirmed were acting strange. Their eyes were light and glassy and they weren’t responding to anyone who tried to speak to them. More importantly, they attempted to attack and bite anyone who came near them. High school guidance counselor Madison Clark (Kim Dickens) saw this behavior at her school, when the kindly principal turned growling and vicious on her. She also witnessed this when she and her fiance Travis Manawa (Cliff Curtis) went to rescue her missing son, Nick, (Frank Dillane), and they had a run-in with his zombified childhood friend, Calvin. Madison and Travis know this is not just a flu, and can’t possibly comprehend the severity of the circumstances at this point, but they do realized they need to get out of town before things get worse.

Fear the Walking Dead
Season 1 Episode 2 “So Close, Yet So Far”
Directed by Adam Davidson
Written by Marco Ramirez
Starring Kim Dickens, Cliff Curtis, Frank Dillane, Alycia Debnam-Carey, Lorenzo James Henrie, Elizabeth Rodriguez, Ruben Blades, Mercedes Mason, Patricia Reyes Spindola
AMC
Air Date: Sunday, August 30, 2015, 9pm

Last week saw the series premiere of Fear the Walking Dead, a prequel spin-off to AMC’s popular drama The Walking Dead that takes us away from the back woods of Georgia into the shining streets of Los Angeles to the early days when the zombie virus was unknowingly being spread throughout the land. The pilot introduced high school guidance counselor Madison Clark (Kim Dickens) and her live-in fiance, English teacher Travis Manawa (Cliff Curtis), whose efforts to blend their two families into one harmonious unit was proving disastrous. Madison’s good-girl daughter Alicia Clark (Alycia Debnam Carey) is looking for a way to rebel and her son Nick Clark (Frank Dillane) is a junkie, while Travis’s young son Chris (Lorenzo James Henrie) wants nothing to do with his father, who he resents for leaving his mother, Liza Ortiz (Elizabeth Rodriguez), a nursing student.

While the series opened with a few offhand mentions of a flu that’s keeping more and more students and staff at the high school out sick each day, the focus of the story was really on Madison’s family drama, but the audience already knows that there’s way more serious “drama” to come. Nick, strung out in a drug den, had witnessed his infected friend chowing down on a victim, as the bodies of several other people laid dead around them. Fleeing in horror, Nick was promptly hit by a car, which led to a brief admittance to the hospital and a confession to Travis about what he saw, but Madison thought it was just a drugged-up hallucination. By episode’s end, all hell was breaks loose with Nick with Madison and Travis experiencing their first zombie attack.

Chaos, confusion, fear, and death are coming.