BEFORE.
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Merle Haggard’s “Mama Tried” plays.
Alicia, Strand, Luciana, and Nick sleep peacefully and rise gently for the day.
Alicia draws back her shades, looks out at a baseball stadium converted into a quaint community. Everyone is settled in.
Madison peers through a pair of binoculars. A young girl, Charlie, stands beside her.
“Your family. Can you tell me anything about them?” Madison asks.
“I don’t wanna talk about it,” Charlie says.
They talk. A motherly Madison gets her to open up.
“I know living here is gonna take a while getting used to. But this is home now. And I want it to feel that way,” Madison tells her. “I’ll do everything I can to make that happen. I just need you to help me a little bit.”
She asks the girl what direction she came from when she found the stadium. Charlie points out past the parking lot, empty save for strewn about walkers.
Slide 1
“Good morning, folks. This is your friendly morning wake up call,” rings out a booming voice over speaker. “Today marks 365 days in the diamond.”
Madison, hammer in hand, converts a dugout. Fashioning Charlie a place of her own.
Nick unearths turnips. They’re half-dead. Charlie supervises, talks his ear off.
“How much food do we have in the pantries?” she asks.
“Enough.”
“Yeah,” she says, “but how long would it last if it’s all we had?”
Nick tells her she doesn’t have to worry about stuff like that anymore.
Madison mounts a party to look for Charlie’s parents. She advocates going out of range in the search.
Exploding baseballs are fired off towards shambling walkers as a means of distraction.
Luci, half in the truck, is ready to head out with Strand, Madison and Alicia. Nick stays behind.
“Don’t you get bored in here?” Luci asks.
“I do, yeah,” he says, “it’s great.”
They drive off.
“He’s gotta come out some time,” Luci says.
“He will when its right,” Madison tells her. “You weren’t there when I found him, Luci. He just needs to be in a place where he feels safe right now.”
Nick solved his turnip problem: weevils.
Slide 2
The foursome, now out of range of homebase, split into pairs. Luci and Strand and Madison and Alicia clear an emptied town. Picked clean.
Looters “took everything,” Strand reports. “Even the lightbulbs.”
Outside, Madison and Alicia spot a makeshift flag billowing in the wind. Spray painted on the dirtied cloth is “457.”
“What do you think it means?” Alicia asks.
“I don’t know,” Madison says.
They search. Find a ruined camp.
“You guys see any signs of survivors?” Alicia asks over walkie talkie.
“None,” Strand answers. “And it’s not only the survivors who are in absentia. The dead. Where are they? We haven’t seen one since we entered this berg.”
Luci says Madison will overturn every rock.
“She’s the only reason I’m here,” Strand says of the Clark matriarch. “She didn’t just find me down there, she saved me, and she didn’t have to.”
Charlie asks Nick why he never goes out there. “I like it better in here,” he answers. What happened to him?
At the ruined camp, a gun is pulled on Madison. She turns, slowly, faces a dirtied and lone survivor. “Your keys. Hand them over,” she demands.
“You don’t have to do this,” Madison says, discretely tapping her walkie to alert for help.
The desperate woman says again: “Keys.”
Madison reasons with her. She’s teary-eyed and alone. Doesn’t want to pull the trigger, but…
Relieves Madison of the keys herself. Alicia enters.
Then Strand and Luci. She’s surrounded, makes a run for it.
Madison and Alicia try to reason with her and help her out, but she falls into a mucky water tanker. Inside, the woman fends off a closing-in pack of walkers.
Madison drops in, felling walkers with her blade. The pair go back-to-back, fighting off the dead.
Strand frees an opening. Blackened water and its occupants flood out.
Inside, Alicia sees Madison rise slowly. The familiar growls of a walker…
“Mom?” she asks. Dispatches a nearby walker. Madison turns around — psyche. She’s fine.
Later. The woman gives her name.
“Naomi. My name is Naomi,” she tells her rescuers. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t going to hurt you.”
The ruined camp wasn’t hers. She had nothing to do with them.
Slide 3
At the diamond, Nick hears classical music. It’s faint, but nearby.
“I need you to open the gate,” he tells Charlie. She’s up to the task.
Nick, in a truck, readies himself to go out there. Grips the steering wheel. Closes his eyes.
Flashes of the exploded dam.
The truck goes out, slow but steady.
Nick at the dam. Finger on the trigger. BOOM.
Walkers crowd the truck — flashes of the dam — the truck smacks into a street light.
Madison and company pick up a dazed Nick and bring him back.
Madison and Charlie.
“It’s okay,” the girl says. “I know you didn’t find them.”
“I’ve gotta ask you another question. It’s not an easy one. What happened at your camp? Do you know who did that?”
Charlie casts her eyes down. They’ll talk another time.
Naomi treats Nick’s minor head wound. She is — was a nurse.
“ER, then ICU,” she tells a nosey Nick.
Nick bails. Madison sits.
“How many people live here?”
“47. 48 if you decide to stay.”
“I pulled a gun on you.”
“But you didn’t shoot. I’ve done a lot worse when I was out there. We all did. I thought I lost my kids for good because of it. But I found ’em. And then we found this place, and we built it up. Together. We are who we are because of it.”
“You don’t even know me.”
“And you don’t know us. So we’re both taking a chance. I know it’s a lot.” She tells her to shower, think it over.
“Shower?” Naomi asks, incredulous.
Holy sh—t. This joint has hot water.
On watch, Luci spots a near-dozen invading trucks of all sizes.
Alicia tells Strand to hit the armory, bring everything.
Slide 4
The survivors watch, guns at the ready, as some a—hole mounts a bicycle and rides around. Classic music plays.
Nearby walkers are entranced. The guy lures the walkers towards the back of a trailer, leading them in.
The guy grabs spray paint. Sprays a “12” onto the trailer’s side.
Another guy, the gang leader, sits on a cheap lawn chair with a can of beer.
The gates open and Madison heads out.
“There a problem?” she asks.
“We’re good,” he says. “You want one?”
“We got a lotta people inside with a lotta guns,” Madison tells him. Stern.
“That’s a hell of a welcome.”
“We saw what you did to that camp, by those tanks.’
“You think we did that?”
“Your flag was flying over it.”
“Yeah. Because we had to clean up their mess. 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.”
She’s sick of this guy already.
Slide 5
“What do you want from us?” Madison asks. Wary.
“We want you to listen,” he tells her. “‘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.”
“How the hell do you know his name?”
“Come here, kiddo.”
Like a dog, Charlie immediately trots over.
He’s sorry they’re late. He has new records for her on the bus.
“God, she’s a good kid. Found her a while back. Turns out she has a real knack for finding the good stuff,” he tells Madison. “Boy… she hit the jackpot here.”
Slide 6
“You’re not taking anything from us.”
She means it.
“People always say that,” he says.
“See, we’re not taking anything from anyone. Anyone who’s alive, anyway. You see… I’ve had this conversation a hundred times. 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 theres 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.”
Sticks out his hand. “I’m Mel, by the way.”
Madison looks at his hand like it’s sh—t.
“We’re not going anywhere.”
“Yeah, I’ve heard that before too.”
“We’ve lived like you. Moving from place to place, doing whatever it took to make it. We’re not going back to that life.”
“You saying you’re better than us?”
“I’m saying we found a better way.”
“You live in there in those walls, you don’t have to do the sorts of things we have to do. 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.”
He takes his seat. Sips his beer. Waits.
Slide 7
The next day. The vultures are camped out in the parking lot. Like it’s a tailgate party ahead of a Sunday afternoon football game.
The diamond gate swings open. Luci approaches the bus. Drops a book off for Charlie. ‘The Little Prince.’ Leaves without a word.
Madison diligently constructs the dugout intended for Charlie.
NOW.
Morgan, John, and Althea are on their knees outside the S.W.A.T. vehicle.
Alicia, Nick, Strand, and Luci pick them over.
“We’re not who you think we are,” Morgan says.
Nick digs through some stuff.
“Help yourself,” John tells him.
Nick grabs Althea’s prized video camera, upsetting the journalist.
Slide 8
“You’re with them,” Luci says, unfolding a flag. On it: a spray-painted “51.”
“With who?” Althea asks.
“The Vultures,” Strand says.
“I don’t know what that means,” Althea says, telling the truth. “Maybe if you assh—oles put your guns down we could help each other. Who put that flag up? What did they do to you?”
“How about you answer our questions?” Alicia says. “That flag isn’t yours?”
It’s not.
“All right,” Alicia says, “show us where you found it.”
The trio are loaded into the commandeered vehicle.
Morgan just wanted to be left alone.
The S.W.A.T. tanker drives off.
End of episode.
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Image Credit: Apple TV+
