Headscratchers / Fear the Walking Dead

• How did the windshield of Travis's pickup truck get shattered?
  • Hitting Calvin in episode 1?
    • That's at the end of the episode. Window's broken from the beginning. Cal hit the hood, anyway.
  • It's visual shorthand for the audience of the lower-middle class status the Manawa-Clark family has. They don't have the spare funds to cover a windshield repair/replacement, averting Informed Poverty.
• In episode 2, it's clear that sick Matt has a cellphone. He says his parents will be home today. Why not try calling his parents who must have cellphones, too?
  • Isn't that how he knew they were coming home?
    • He did, but the main characters didn't try calling and saying "Your son is sick, you may want to hustle."
  • Matt or Alicia may already have called Matt's folks about the situation, in which case calling them again isn't going to get them home any faster.
  • Alicia already mentioned that she tried calling them but received no response.
  • More puzzling is why Matt makes no attempt to explain his bite. Wouldn't you be freaked out and mention that some crazy person got into your home, attacked you, bit you & now you're sick? If only to warn your girlfriend to watch out, if nothing else! Yet Matt is completely calm, as though he has flu. Likewise, no one else shows any curiosity as to the circumstances. You'd think Travis and Maddy would want the information so they know what to look out for and Alicia, who is completely unaware Walkers are running around is even more baffling in her disinterest..
    • He could have been in denial or downplaying it for Alicia's sake.
• There's no back door to barbershop. Isn't that a fire hazard?
  • Truth in Television. Many older buildings, especially those in lower class neighborhoods, don't follow regular safety standards.
  • Or their occupants block up the rear entrances deliberately, being justifiably more fearful of break-ins than fires.
• Why was there a genuine effort to airlift the sick and the wounded, but no such thing for a neighbourhood of healthy, able-bodied people? Doesn't the military realise that they need every working pair of hands that they can get to have any hope of resolving the crisis?
  • What I noticed from the field hospital was an abnormally large number of military wounded. What I gathered is that they would rather evac their own wounded than otherwise healthy civilians.
  • More like whoever's still nominally in charge knew they'd have an outright mutiny on their hands if they didn't make at least a token effort to evac the soldiers' wounded comrades.
• Strand's circumstances in the first season are somewhat illogical. He's shown to have a beachfront home - on the other side of the city, far away from the area where the command post/prison was set up. It's not clear how or why he was brought there in the first place, especially when he regards the Clarks' neighborhood as something he hasn't heard of in a while and it was stated that there were multiple safezones erected throughout the city. Despite the soldiers checking his temperature, he never seems to display any sort of symptoms and actually has a good rapport with one of the soldiers, to the point that soldier intended to bust him out and take him along when he escaped. And if he had a boat in the first place, why didn't he leave days before once he realized things were getting bad?
  • He was probably near the neighbourhood on business when things went to hell and he was unable to get back to his mansion. He may have been busted specifically for trying to escape the safe zone in hopes of getting to his boat. And his good rapport with the soldiers comes from his natural charisma, as well as the bribes that he seems to be generous with.
  • He wasn't necessarily in the Clarks' safezone; the medical outpost probably drew its patients/prisoners from multiple sites, possibly including one that was upper-crust enough for Strand to be there for a date or whatever when the chaos kicked off.
• Madison sees a walker walking close to her house. She and her daughter run out of their house to get a gun from a neighbor's place. Here's the headscratcher...why did they leave their door open? They act surprised to see the walker enter their home. Shouldn't they be smart enough to close the door behind them (leaving it unlock). The walkers are mindless monsters. They wouldn't be smart enough to turn the knob and open the door. Just close the door behind you, leaving it unlock for you to get back in later.
  • The series has continually shown that Madison and Alicia are not exactly the smartest or at least not the most well equipped to deal with an apocalypse scenario. They were too panicked at the time to realize they left the door open.
• Remember the guy who "obligated" Nick? He saved his life by bribing one of the soldiers. If the world is going to hell, what good money and jewelry will do you? It will be worthless.
  • Presumably, the soldier was way more optimistic about the military turning the situation around than most at that point, and Strand played off that.
  • Real life survivalists stock up on gold, even though it wouldn't have a lot of practical value in a post-apocalyptic world. People have their conceptions of what's valuable, like gold, or money and precious gems, and those conceptions wouldn't have changed instantly when things have only just started falling apart.
• The bitten solider who was killed by a helicopter propeller... was it a suicide, or did he kill himself accidentally?
  • Seemed like he deliberately did it. At this point, most of the military should already know that there's no cure for a bite.
  • Plus, there was a horde incoming. Better to quickly get chopped up than to get eaten alive or, even if you survive the horde, slowly succumb to the infection.
• Remember those hundreds of walkers that were locked away? Why didn't the soldiers exterminate them? They could have put 5 or 10 in a cage and shove a knife though their heads one by one.
  • How exactly would they get 5 or 10 at a time? There were thousands of them packed in tight, the second they open one of the doors it'd be like trying to close a flood gate with your bare hands. As for why they didn't kill them to start with Adams explains that walkers were reanimating very quickly and they had to seal them in quickly along with people who weren't infected, so they wouldn't have any time to set up cages.
  • They could have set up the zombie version of a cattle chute, funnel in zombies a few at a time, close the chute, kill the walkers inside, burn the bodies, rinse and repeat. It'd be a long arduous process, but so is filling sandbags, and it would ensure no one would be hurt. However, the military in Fear the Walking Dead are meant to be villainous and stupid, so they cannot do anything that would actually stop the zombie apocalypse, and prevent the show from continuing.
  • Doing that would take up time, resources, and manpower, none which they can spare. It's much easier just to lock up the walkers and deal with them later.
  • The Season 2 premiere shows L.A. being bombed en masse, which suggests that the military was already planning to use bombs to put down the walkers. Possibly the stadium-walkers was left alone because that building was one of the first locations on the bombers' target-list, and was slated to be incinerated whether or not the city got written off.
    • The bombs might have been the last resort option, if the gathering and quarantining did not work.
• Is it ever stated what is wrong with Madison? It could be just bad acting but she seems very detached from everything right from the start, to be honest she seems more high than her junkie son.
  • Everyone responds differently to stressful situations, and some of those responses can seem inappropriate, like people who smile or even laugh to cope with bad news. Madison's might just be to pull back, to separate herself emotionally from the situation. Especially since she was a counselor, and might have needed to maintain a level of detachment there, helping people with their problems without getting too invested.
• Is Mexico still standing? they kept talking about getting to Mexico like if there was an actual border control they need to get through and like they need to pay someone to smuggle them across the borders.... Political borders should mean nothing on the Zombie Apocalypse
  • It's still the early days. It seems that the plague started in the United States and spread out from there, so other governments, including Mexico, are still hanging on by a thread. And probably putting every last bit of their remaining resources into border control, at that. Also, the US military still seems to be around, too, considering that they only just bombed the major cities to quell the spread of the undead.
  • Strand has also pointed out that the US-Mexico border is one of the most heavily guarded in the world, with numerous military and law enforcement personnel keeping watch over it. If there was any place that could resist the zombie outbreak, it would be the border.
  • The latter half of Season 2 indicates that Mexico is not any better off than the United States.
• Why doesn't Nick just flat out tell Madison that covering yourself in zombie guts can hide your scent? He was pretty vague about it. He only tells her he figured out a way to walk among them and be "invisible". It would be nice for him to tell them HOW he does it. It feels like he is keeping this trick to himself for some reason.
  • This is most likely a result of Nick becoming increasingly detached from his family and the group as their viewpoints and priorities diverge.
• Why didn't the people of La Colonia put a lock on the backdoor of the bus? Marco and his crew come in, try the door, it's locked and now they're surrounded by walkers. Could've very well prevented their cliffhanger of a fate.
  • That bus was old and rusted. A lock wouldn't stop a group of well armed men for very long, the crowbar they used to pry the fence off alone could do it within a minute or two. They could also easily set up a perimeter around one or two of them breaking into it.
• The three gunmen that were chasing Nick are too dumb to live. The way two of them died is a major headscratcher. Why didn't the two run away when the walkers were moving closer to them? The overweight gunman had plenty of time to get away, but he stood in the same spot trying to shoot them all. The other guy didn't budge either. He just sat there, picking up his bullets from the ground. I get that he was shocked to see Nick among the walkers, but c'mon! He couldn't be THAT dumbfounded!
  • Sometimes people get locked into a pattern of behavior when they're panicking. All they can think is "shoot" and so they just keep trying to shoot, even when it becomes irrational. In their minds, shooting should remove a threat, should kill things, and so in their panic they just keep going, some part of them believing that it surely must work eventually.
• How does Madison have her name? The feminine given name "Madison" originates from the 1984 film Splash. A woman with the first name Madison would be less than 30 years old by the time the series begins, while Madison herself has an adult son.
  • It doesn't really originate with that film, it just made it more popular. As a man's given name, it's been around since at least 1805, and Madison Nguyen was born in 1975. Plus it's not unusual for some people to use surnames as first names, so it's not impossible for her to have that name at her age.
    • It's not impossible, but it would have been an extremely unusual name for a woman at the time of the character's birth. The concept of a woman named Madison was literally a joke in 1984.
• What's with the weird friendship between Troy and Nick? I get it, they have some things in common, but Troy and his pals EXECUTED people back at the beginning of season 3. Not to mention he led a horde of walkers to the ranch. It seems awkward for Nick to be buds with the guy after all of that.
  • Nick is shown pretty consistently throughout the show to have self-destructive tendencies, and to get himself involved with morally questionable people—his dealer at the beginning, Strand, Celia. He seems to look up to Troy, possibly because he thinks Troy is more of a survivor than, say, his brother Jake, who comes off a bit naive and rigid. In any case, there's definitely some kind of bond forming between them (I even wondered if there was an element of Ho Yay—at one point Troy remarks to him "You stayed at the ranch because you love me"), and I was interested to see where it was leading when Troy was killed off.
• Why does everyone at the ranch accept the Clarks so readily as leaders? Did I miss something? This was especially jarring towards the end of season 3, when the ranch residents are deferring to the barely-18-year-old Alicia.
  • The same reason the people of Alexandria deferred to Grimes's crew: the people who have been "out in the world" fighting walkers and scrounging supplies are seen as having more experience with survival and crises. Most of the people in these communities have just been following their leaders and living in a bubble of safety.
• In Season 4, it's obvious why Morgan had some sympathy for Martha being in a bad place, and thinking he could help her to redemption along a similar arc to that which he had followed. But given the manifest threat she was to the group, why didn't some other group member just kill her when they had the opportunity?
  • That was part of Martha's intention with Morgan: she wanted to bring him down to her level to make him "stronger." She seemed to understand a little too much about Morgan's history and while she set out to kill others, she was personally fixated on destroying Morgan in a much worse way. Killing has set Morgan down a dangerous spiral several times before, so he was trying to avoid that path, knowing well that if she goaded him to killing her, she would have accomplished her goal.
  • As hardened as the protagonists are, they're still moral people who would rather not kill someone if they can help it. When Martha is amok, they shoot at her, but when she's helpless and/or taken captive, they don't think that she's a threat anymore.
• In Season 4 there's a poisoning incident in which someone taints bottled water with antifreeze. But ethylene glycol—the primary component of antifreeze—tastes sweet. This is why it's a such a large poisoning hazard to children and pets, both of which are naturally attracted to sweet drinks. Anyone drinking bottled water that had been adulterated with automotive antifreeze would notice the sweet taste. Not to mention, most automotive antifreezes are dyed a bright color such as green or orange.
  • Clear case of Artistic License – Pharmacology.
  • Colorless antifreeze is still fairly common, I don't think it's unreasonable that she found some. And it can lose its sweetness with age, like if it's been sitting on a shelf for a few years during a zombie apocalypse. Or they might have noticed the sweetness, but brushed it off as "oh man, this water tastes so good because living largely as a scavenger makes me thirsty and I haven't had water this pure in a while!" In a world where zombies are the main threat, and where you don't always have a steady supply of food and water, you probably won't jump to "someone deliberately poisoned this with antifreeze, I need to spit it out right now".
• So in Season 7, Episode 6 Morgan finds the group that got evacuated by Isabelle in the Season 6 finale and brings them to the sub. But why? Wouldn't it have been better to take Grace and Mo to the Bed-and-Breakfast they were staying at? It's outside the area affected by the nukes, and as far as I know Strand doesn't know where it's at, unlike the sub they're staying in.
  • If Strand did find them and decided to attack, they'd be safer on the Pennsylvania. The sub is proof against most weapons, and it has food, water, power, and most importantly, military-grade radiation protection. Plus, it's possible that weather patterns are still pushing fallout to new areas, and the area with the Bed-and-Breakfast could've been at risk.
  • Plus, as we see later on, the sub had the emergency rafts which they used to evacuate as a group. Bringing everyone back so they could move out together makes a bit of sense. Safety in numbers and such.