Fear The Walking Dead: Easter Eggs and Analysis on "Pilot"

It's the first episode of Fear The Walking Dead, and while that gives us a lot less to work with [...]

By Russ Burlingame

It's the first episode of Fear The Walking Dead, and while that gives us a lot less to work with than we would ordinarily get from stories set in the rich universe of The Walking Dead (or other comic book shows, for that matter), this one also tried to have something more to say than most single episodes of the parent show.

So while we might have have as many traditional Easter eggs, we do get a fair amount of narrative

So...what did we see? What did we miss? Read on...

Gloria

This is almost certainly not an Easter egg, but it amuses me to include it. The first infected we see on the show is Gloria, whose name is called out several times before she manifests.

What's special about that? Well, series star Kim Dickens played Gloria Sullivan in Zero Effect, a film I've seen probably about 150 times, since it was one of the only VHS tapes I had with me when I went to college. It's one of my favorite films and I have a signed photo of a still from the movie on my office wall.

So I'm counting it.

Drugs and zombies

See also: iZombie.

In the pilot, there's a definite vibe (I didn't get it, but I talked to people at Comic-Con who did) that there might be a connection between the drugs being done and the zombism. Ultimately, we know that won't matter since The Walking Dead won't give away the source of its outbreak.

House phone

Nobody calls your house phone anymore unless it's an emergency.

This is one of those tropes I've seen played out in fiction, both played straight (as here, or procedural dramas) or for laughs (I think Cougar Town did it). The way Dickens and Cliff Curtis stare at that phone, it seems like the only time anyone ever rings it is when there's bad news about her drug-addicted son.

Hospital stay

Just like Rick, one of our heroes gets a hospital stay in the pilot -- and encounters the earliest stages of the outbreak while there. Luckily for all involved, this hospital stay doesn't last as long.

"Another victim"

Victim of...what?

It seems that very early on, we have certain people withholding information from others. Medical and law enforcement staff refer to repeat cases and additional victims as though there's something larger going on, and yet when the first walker of the episode gets out into the open and is shot down by police, it's treated as a freak incident nobody can understand.

Elizabeth Rodriguez, who plays Liza, said at Comic-Con that her character is a med student and thus becomes privy to information earlier than many of the others. Seems they're planting some of that early.

Of course, all of that is kind of unrelated to the actual line about "another victim," which comes from the oblivious school principal. It's not the last time they'll use him to tease the audience a little.

Checkhov's knife

Who wants to bet THAT will come in handy later?!

If the student whose knife was taken away doens't show up as a walker, or try to steal it back, or if the knife doesn't turn out to save somebody's life in a big way later, that was a wasted scene.

My money's on that poor kid is doomed.

The Man of Steel

There's a pretty overt reference to John Byrne's The Man of Steel #1 hidden in that mural at the high school.

Four walls and a roof

Houses of worship don't fare too well in the world of The Walking Dead.

This place helps them to preserve The Walking Dead's aesthetic, though. Dingy, violent, generally awful. It's a change of pace from most of LA, which still holds together pretty well at least so far.

School Subtext Theatre

Having a working educational facility in this pilot alters the story in a key way from the original: we can have a lot of intellectualizing about society. Man vs. nature, chaos theory, etc.

Stealing from the dead

The old guy won't need these clothes...heh?

A different world

...Not a lot of pickup trucks in The Walking Dead. Not exactly a hugely practical vehicle.

"This is the new real"

… "Killshot, bitch."

As juvenile as that kind of comes off, yeah...that IS the new real, which the audience knows and the characters either don't, or only really think they do.

Spoilers, woohoo!

Now we know why they removed those images released very early on. One of the very first images they released from the series was the family standing over the body of a walker -- who plays a major, spoilery role in the pilot's plot!

Some additions from Reddit:

There was the 28 Days Later scene in the church at the beginning, then the motorcyclist who almost clipped Cliff Curtis' character like the motorcycle cop from World War Z. Also, that restaurant towards the end is the one from Pulp Fiction.

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