Warning: There are some spoilers ahead if you haven't watched the premiere episode of "Fear the Walking Dead."
"Fear the Walking Dead," the spin-off companion series to AMC's "The Walking Dead" debuted Sunday evening, and it wasted no time getting straight to the undead.
We're introduced to the zombie apocalypse through the eyes of Nick Clark (Frank Dillane) who awakens in an abandoned church, and, soon afterward, comes across the first zombie of the series, a female as she's feasting away on another individual.
Horrified and confused by what he sees, Nick hauls it out of there, running barefoot down the streets of Los Angeles before getting struck by a car.
Next, he does what anyone else who has just seen a flesh-eating zombie tearing away at another human being would do. He tells people what he saw.
However, there's just one problem. Nick's a drug addict so no one believes him. Doctors, police, and even his mother all believe it's a crazy hallucination brought on by the drugs in his system.
Poor Nick.
The rest of the premiere episode introduces us to the rest of Nick's large blended family as they, too, begin to see strange occurrences around them and they slowly begin to realize that everything isn't hunky-dory in Los Angeles, and that heroin-addict Nick may have been telling the truth all along.
While that's the version of the premiere we saw on screen, "Fear the Walking Dead" executive producer and special effects artist Greg Nicotero told Tech Insider the episode could have happened a bit differently.
"There’s a version of the pilot of ‘Fear the Walking Dead’ that the whole thing could be construed as a hallucination," said Nicotero.
He said the idea for the episode sounded similar to one of the biggest fan theories surrounding the events of the original series.
"Much like in ‘The Walking Dead’ everyone’s like, ‘Oh, one of these days, Rick’s gonna wake up and we’re gonna find out that he was in a coma the whole time and the zombie apocalypse never happened," said Nicotero.
Of course, "The Walking Dead" creator Robert Kirkman put to rest any theories on the entirety of the series being one big coma dream last year after the theory started making the rounds online.
While we didn't end up seeing the apocalypse as one big hallucination Sunday night, Nicotero loves how the episode ended up coming together.
"I think we sort of teased the audience at the beginning, and I love the aspect of … everyone assuming that it was a hallucination and of course he [Nick] doesn’t even trust his own mind in terms of what he really saw," says Nicotero. "We’re basically playing out the beginning of the zombie apocalypse through the eyes of a drug addict. And everything in his mind is questioned. It’s not until somebody else is standing next to him and sees something that we really know, ‘Okay, something’s crazy.’"
"Fear the Walking Dead" airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on AMC.
