FEAR THE WALKING DEAD “Red Dirt” Recap

By Jaylyn Cook

Last week’s Fear the Walking Dead introduced us to Walker, who is clearly being established as this season’s main villain. This week’s episode, “Red Dirt,” further prepared us for what’s probably going to be an earth-shattering finale down the road. 

Fear of the outside world and distrust of the current leadership have slowly started to eat away at the foundation of the Otto ranch, but this episode showed that if Jeremiah won’t step up to the plate for the group, Madison surely will. How she does it, however, is a source of contention between her and Nick. 

The episode picks up where we last left off. Madison, Troy, and the rest of the search party finally return to camp – albeit with bloodied feet and severe dehydration after their run-in with Walker. Troy tries as hard as he can to keep everything that went down outside of the border under wraps, but the other survivors swiftly force his hand. 

The most vocal of those survivors is Vernon, one of the surviving “founding fathers” or the ranch and father to Mike (friend/traumatized second-in-command of Troy) and Gretchen (Alicia’s “Bible study” friend). After hearing of Walker’s threats and witnessing the gradual splintering of the Otto’s leadership, he ultimately decides to move his whole family off of the ranch. 

Jeremiah is despondent. With the deaths of Phil and Russell, and Vernon’s departure, this makes him sole founding father left on the compounding. Everything he’s grown to know over the past few years has crumbled right in front of his eyes, and there’s nothing he can do about it. He knows people are losing their faith in him, and has picked up drinking again to cope. 

Troy is also in a pretty bad spot. He confides to Madison that he’s basically afraid of losing the people he cares for the most to the outside world. Mike was his best friend for years, and since there’s basically no way for the two to keep in touch beyond the border, he’ll have to accept that he’ll never see him again. 

As common with the drastically different personality traits of all three Otto men, they each respond to the group’s splintering in radically different ways. Troy responds with anger. He tries to intimidate Vernon and his family into staying on the ranch, but it doesn’t work. Jake tries to be a mediator. He approaches the situation with patience and reason, but is usually drowned out by Troy’s over-the-top, aggro behavior. 

And Jeremiah? He doesn’t really care anymore. Instead of leading, he drinks and spits tired platitudes to anyone who will listen. He’s donezo. 

So, this puts Madison, Nick, and Alicia in an interesting spot. In the short time that they’ve been on the ranch, they’ve managed to form relationships with the Otto’s in different capacities. They could just bounce and let the ranch implode on itself, or, they could use their newfound influence to help right the sinking ship. For now, they have decided to do the latter. 

Madison tries to convince Jeremiah to take action against Walker, but the elder Otto says “no.” He’s beaten Walker several times in court about the ownership of the land, and he ultimately believes that his arch-nemesis doesn’t have enough firepower to take the ranch by force. Even when Walker plants fires all around the ranch’s border, he doesn’t bat an eye. 

This is bad. Madison and Troy have seen straight up how big of a threat Walker is, but the old man is too stubborn to do anything about it. 

Jake tries to take Alicia’s advice and venture beyond the fence and negotiate a deal with Walker, but Alicia reminds him that the concept of “law” is now null and void. Why should Walker negotiate with anyone when he can just feed them to a crow? Alicia passionately convinces him to stay. They’re still casually seeing each other on the down-low, which Alicia tells Madison isn’t anything serious after she gets caught sneaking in at a late hour. 

Madison doesn’t give Alicia any more grief on the subject, but she tenderly reminds her that love can sneak up on us. Obvious foreshadowing. 

Meanwhile, this episode marked a major change in pace for Nick. Luciana is gone. His last ditch effort to convince her to stay failed, and she left the camp to head down south. He’s hurt, but instead of wallowing, he decides to process that hurt by taking trips to the gun range with Jeremiah. 

He’s become way more comfortable around guns since last week. You know, when he told Jeremiah how much he didn’t like guns? He’s not a bad shot. He even took out a walker with no hesitation after Madison faltered. There was a good reason for that, though, which we’ll get to momentarily. Anyway, Nick has stepped into the position that was left wide open after Travis died. 

He and Madison basically look to each other when a serious leadership decision arises, and while Madison is the one to make the final decisions, she takes what he says into much more consideration than she may have in the past. He can handle himself, and make his own decisions, and take matters into his hands if need be. However, that doesn’t mean that he and his mother see eye-to-eye about everything. 

A prime example of this happened near the midway point of the episode. Jeremiah is convinced that something has happened to Vernon and his family after he sees that one of their horses has returned to the ranch. He, Madison, and Nick venture out to find them. When they finally find the Trimbol’s RV laying stagnant in the desert, Jeremiah’s fears are confirmed. All of the Trimbol’s are dead, and they have turned into walkers. 

Jeremiah finishes off his old friend Vernon and his wife Kathy. Nick is long dead, and Gretchen is found feasting on a live horse with a group of walkers. The other walkers are quickly disposed of, but Madison hesitates to kill Gretchen. Nick, however, gets the job done. After letting the tension simmer down a bit, Jeremiah raises another concern: he thinks that Troy is the one who killed the Trimbol’s for leaving the ranch. 

If we’re going to be honest, the signs do point right in his direction. The RV was riddled with bullets when the trio found it, and Troy was NOT a happy camper when they decided to leave. Jeremiah knows his son better than most people, and he’s convinced this was his doing. Madison, however, takes a different approach. 

Back on the ranch, she shows the Trimbol’s bodies to all of the horrified survivors and gives a speech to convince them to stay at the ranch. Why? Because Walker and his men are out there, and they’ll kill them they same way they killed the Trimbol’s, Phil, Travis, and countless others. It worked, as everyone who considered leaving decided to stay. 

Nick is less than thrilled with Madison’s unexpected and blatant lie, but he begrudgingly goes with the flow. As for Troy, Madison met up with him later that night and commanded that he step up and be a hero for the ranch. It’s a strange moment, mostly because Madison has brought up her distrust of Troy on countless occasions, but he follows her order and gives her his word. 

Judging by the looks of it, it’s safe to say that all of the cannons are currently loaded at the ranch. Next week is the mid-season finale, so prepare yourself for an explosion or two.