Fear the Walking Dead Just Delivered Its Most "Grotesque" Episode Yet

Maybe, well, fearing that it paled in comparison to the shock-heavy The Walking Dead, the show amped up the action and undead Walkers for its first seven episodes, before killing a key character and splitting the Manawa/Clark family central to the action apart in the midseason finale.

Side note: unlike The Walking Dead, which has fervently stuck by its rule of not using zombie guts as camouflage for very specious reasons, Fear the Walking Dead has applied the "more guts the merrier" rule, allowing Nick to pass through hordes of zombies whenever he wants.

Dillane, who has made Nick one of the best, most surprising characters in anything Walking Dead (comics and video games included), passes the test with honors.

In flashbacks we get to find out more about Gloria (Lexi Johnson), the woman Nick was lying with in a drug den during the very beginning of the pilot episode of Fear.

[...] there's no more mornings for Gloria; but that also calls back nicely to something Nick says in his first scene with her (while she play acts as his father) earlier in the episode, back in rehab: "Fathers are supposed to show sons how to be a man in the world, but I guess the world is too much for you."

[...] that applies to the undead, to Nick wandering the countryside drenched in human blood, to the men gleefully driving around shooting walkers for sport.

[...] when it comes to literature, a Grotesque is usually a mix of tragedy and comedy, as well as indicating a character that elicits both empathy, and disgust.

- Nick gets woken up and attacked by a crazy woman screaming incomprehensibly, waving a baseball bat.