Fear The Walking Dead: What’s In The Flashing House?

I was struck by how good the ending of Fear The Walking Dead was this week, much better than anything I’ve seen in the stagnated The Walking Dead in recent years.  The series is getting some hate for being too slow, but if the ending is being written like I think it is, it’s damn good TV.  If you haven’t seen it, there will be spoilers written here.

The military have set up a quarantine zone in the Los Angeles suburbs, the main group (the Clark and Manawa) families are living safely within this area, with a six mile exclusion zone.  The the central theme throughout Episode 4, Not Fade Away, is the question of what the flashing signal is, that junkie son Nick Clark can see outside the immediate safe zone but still within the six mile radius ‘contained’ zone.  It’s coming from a house.  Maybe half a mile out or less.

Clark thinks that it’s someone signalling for help.

That didn’t make sense to me, the signal is coming from an area that the military has safely cleared.  Any rational person would simply approach the safezone interior itself.  At the end of the episode, the military arrives to remove sick persons for medical evaluation at an undisclosed location, including Manawa’s drug-addicted son.

Distraught, the father places himself on the roof of his house to get away from things and gather his thoughts.  Again he sees the flashing from the house in the distance, only this time it is obviously muzzle flashing.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKyxlugfGwE

When I seen that, I thought, that’s actually really good.  Because the immediate deduction I made was that the military were removing potential threats, taking them a certain distance to a designated execution post and doing the deed.  When I finished the episode I checked social media to gauge reaction to the episode.  It turns out that people are convinced that the military merely went to the house and executed whoever was making the SOS signal.  That doesn’t make sense to me either, and if it is the case, it wouldn’t be as bold and as interesting as I thought it was going to be.

The way I see it and the way I hope it is headed, the flashes that the kid seen during the day are, again, muzzle flashes and that the room is basically an execution chamber, it was all day.  He interpreted it as something else.  In the main series, Rick Grimes eventually figures out that everyone is infected and even if they die accidentally, their bodies still turn.  The military would’ve been the first to know about this, you can be sure of that.  And in this spin off series, they’re eliminating threats in the safe zone.  This would almost certainly have been standard protocol, I’m convinced.

The sickly woman and the heroin addicted sickly kid are forcibly removed at the end of the episode.  Minutes later the father sees what is obviously people being executed in a house about a quarter of a mile out.  It’s not hard to put together, do the maths.  It better be what they’re planning for this series, a bolder and darker approach, sort of like the cannibal angle used in the main series lately, but without the limitation of knowing that Rick Grimes, superhero, will conquer all.

Because the ‘shooting the signallers’ angle is pretty fucking stupid, I’m dissappointed people made such a weak conclusion but will be even more dissappointed if the writers did too.