Read

Apparently, people who live in cities are so immune to noise and distraction that they don’t even pick up on evidence of their impending doom.

Fear the Walking Dead’s (2015) pilot episode was a slow-burning setup for the new family drama, set in the early days of the zombie outbreak made massively popular on its parent series, The Walking Dead (2010). The pilot opens with the series’ apparent central character Nick Clark (Frank Dillane) waking up within a habitat of flesh-eating madness, much like the early moments of The Walking Dead when Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) endured a similar experience. But after that brief section of familiar violence, Fear transitions to a family drama set against a backdrop of armageddon.

Throughout the pilot of Fear, near-constant sounds of sirens, helicopters, and rescue vehicles permeate the background. Though this type of urban noise pollution is nothing uncommon, particularly in people- and crime-heavy Los Angeles, it’s near impossible to find a single moment of auditory rest in the episode.

Kids are missing from school in steadily increasing numbers, a fact first noted in a conversation between guidance counselor Madison (Kim Dickens) and her principal, then later driven home by the half-empty classroom of desks in Madison’s husband Travis’s (Cliff Curtis) classroom.

As the episode’s gloom crawls forward, a viral video hits the news. In it, police unload a dozen bullets into a guy who just won’t stay down - at least, not until one of the cops finally pops him in the head. Half the people who see it are frightened, while the other half dismiss it as a fake. After all, this is modern day. As Madison tells Tobias (Lincoln Castellanos), a student who brought a knife to school after hearing news reports, the authorities would tell us if there were something to worry about. Wouldn’t they? Nobody believes videos like this are real, and there’s something poetically honest about the populous first encountering the apocalypse via social media.

Meanwhile, the news talks casually about a strange virus already spreading across five states.

In thematically-appropriate timing, Los Angeles Unified School District had the chaos theory and Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” on the curriculum docket this week. This scientific principle and literary classic teach of situations impossible to control, and examines scenarios where nature always wins over man.

But it’s those constant sirens and helicopters that really drive home the ambiance of the episode and illustrate a careful attention to detail on the production side. After all, most of the producers involved with Fear the Walking Dead come from The Walking Dead, and they should know how to bleed into the wrecked world we’re used to seeing. While the episode was slower and more family-focused than some may have expected (particularly if they thought they were in store for more of a Walking Dead clone), the show’s leery diligence in establishing an environment on the cusp of disaster was successful, and should usher in an engaging new interpretation of the zombie universe.