'Fear The Walking Dead': Who Are Mel and The Vultures?

Taking What's Left

Like a blend of the Governor and a more easy-going Negan, Mel engages Madison in casual conversation — and he's not deterred by Madison's thinly-veiled threats about having "a lot of people inside with a lot of guns."

She tells him of a picked-over camp her people found sandwiched between water tanks. Above it was a makeshift flag, bearing the number "457."

"You think we did that?" Mel asks. Madison tells him: "Your flag was flying over it."

"Yeah. Because we had to clean up their mess," Mel says. "You see, the thing no one thought about when they built a camp between all those giant metal drums is what would happen if the bleeder valve got jammed on one of those things. We warned them, but… they didn't listen."

He mimes destruction with his hands.

The Mole

Asked what he wants from her people, Mel says only, "We want you to listen. 'Cause you have a mess of your own out here. Don't you? A bad batch of turnips, from what I hear. You should tell Nick to check the rest of his crops too, because weevils are a bitch to get rid of."

Nick has been fighting a ruined field of crops, citing weevils as the cause — but Mel shouldn't know that.

The community had taken in the apparently orphaned Charlie (Alexa Nisenson), who is revealed to be a spy for Mel and his people, sneaking the nomads information about the stadium community's residents and their resources.

Mel says the kid "has a real knack for finding the good stuff."

"You're not taking anything from us," Madison tells him, unimpressed and unafraid.

Mel's Terms

He lays out his philosophy:

"People always say that. See, we're not taking anything from anyone. Anyone who's alive, anyway. You see… I've had this conversation a hundred times," he says.

"We know that you're good people. Yeah? With 27 machine guns, six rifles, 14 hand guns, six dozen hand grenades, and until recently, a great crop yield. But there is a natural cycle to a place like this, okay, and yours is about to run out. So there's two ways this can go. Either you give us your stuff and live — hell, you can join us, you can become one of us. Or we wait for you all to die, trying to make things work. But either way, I end up with that gun on your hip and whatever else I want. That's not a threat. That's just the way it goes."

Nomads No More

"We're not going anywhere," Madison says. They worked too hard and went through too much to vacate the premises.

"Yeah," he tells her, "I've heard that before, too."

"We've lived like you. Moving from place to place, doing whatever it took to make it," she tells him. "We're not going back to that life."

"You saying you're better than us?"

No, Madison replies, "I'm saying we found a better way."

Thinly Veiled Threats

"You live in there in those walls, you don't have to do the sorts of things we have to do," he warns her. "Let me tell you something: you just haven't been tested yet. But you're about to be. Change your mind, we'll be out here waiting."

True to his word, the Vultures park and settle in.

And true to their name, it's not enough to encroach on Madison's territory — they're going to sit back, wait, and watch, and let the stadium denizens die off before picking the bones clean.

Now

Sometime later, Alicia, Nick, Luciana and Strand have found themselves out on their asses.

They come across Morgan, John, and Althea, who have been implicated as Vultures because of a spray-painted "51" flag in their possession.

"You're with them," Luci says, presenting the smoking gun.

Althea doesn't get it. "With who?"

"The Vultures," Strand tells her.

"Who put that flag up?" Althea asks. "What did they do to you?"

Alicia, suspicious, commands the trio to "show us where you found it."

Morgan, John, and Althea are loaded into Althea's commandeered S.W.A.T. van, headed for destinations unknown.

The Saviors + The Scavengers = The Vultures?

On the surface, it seems Fear's newest pack of bad guys are a mix between The Walking Dead's Saviors and the Scavengers: the Vultures aren't forcing other groups into servitude like Negan and his army, but they are waltzing into already claimed territory and trying to get a piece for themselves.

And like the Scavengers, they're largely hands off — at least for now — choosing instead to perch nearby and let their target slowly wither away and die, staying just close enough to swoop in and pick over whatever is left and snatching it for themselves.

How Mel and the Vultures will play into the devastation of the survivors' safe haven remains to be seen, as does Madison's fate — the Clark matriarch is nowhere to be found in the present, and in her absence, her remaining group of survivors might find themselves headed down a bad path.

Fear The Walking Dead airs Sundays at 9/8c on AMC.