Strange choice for a title subject, this one. Pablo and Jessica don’t actually appear in the episode. They can’t, because both of them are dead. They’re each the subject of conversation between characters who knew them, but they don’t affect the episode so much that they deserved the title.
Now we find out how Madison and Strand survived the zombie horde. The answers are rather anticlimactic. Just like I figured, they instantly got over their inebriation and started kicking around the nibblers like they hadn’t just downed 57 martinis apiece. Then after they had wiggle room, they cut one of the zombies open and painted themselves with its blood.
It has not gone unnoticed that on Fear, everybody uses this trick all the time, while on the original series, they know it works yet they almost never do it, no matter how desperate the situation. I don’t get it either.
So anyway, they get out, they barricade the door, they wait around for a while, and then they hear Alicia banging for help from a door outside. Somewhere between one point and another they also note that their car has disappeared, which Strand takes to mean “the girls split.” Madison argues back that it wouldn’t be like Alicia to just leave, so I guess there’s ONE person in the family who won’t. If this is actually what happened to Ofelia, I feel it’s a big cheat.
A lot of people did a double take when they heard Alejandro call the walking bodies out there “sobras,” which sounds very close to “zombies” when spoken aloud in an accent. “Sobra” means “shadow” in Spanish, so he’s calling them “shadows.” But bigger still is his claim that he received his bite wound months ago and he still hasn’t turned, meaning he’s immune.
Do you think he’s lying, or not? If he isn’t, it’s the biggest discovery in either series to date. If he is….well, most of us assume that he is. I expect to meet this world’s version of Ellie from The Last Of Us eventually, but not this soon. It hasn’t even happened in the comics and I expect it to be one of the LAST things Kirkman shows us before he quits. And besides, you’re telling me this man is a pharmacist and he HASN’T tried experimenting with his own blood to manufacture a cure? He would be just standing there, wasting it. Dude be faking.
Anyway, whether he’s immune or not, Alejandro knows the entire community he lives with is on borrowed time. They can’t keep trading drugs for supplies because the drugs will eventually run out. Alejandro asks Nick if he knows anything about drug-brewing. “DO I?????”
In a scene with obvious Breaking Bad parallels, Nick uses the one skill he’s good at to manufacture watered-down versions of the pills they’ve been giving to the dealers outside. Now the question is if this is going to fool them. We don’t find out just yet, but we do come to understand the stakes: one villager comes limping home declaring that he “found Pablo in pieces.”
Pablo, from the title, is Luciana’s brother. That’s rough, but Luciana apparently has wills of steel and ventures back outside to make the new trade. Nick demands to know who Pablo is, apparently thinking he’s her boyfriend. When he finds out the truth, he reaches out to give Luciana a comforting hug, and probably to see if she’ll let him touch her. Cause….you know, no time like the present.
The dealers bought the ruse! For giving the colony some extra time, Crazy Nick has won A BRAND NEW HOUSE!! A used house, actually, with a dead person’s furniture inside, but still, an entire house. And that’s not all! Luciana, show him what else he’s won!
This is about as good as Nick’s life is going to get for a long time. Screwing up is what he excels at, and once he starts being Regular Crazy Aggravating Ol’ Nick again, Luciana’s sexual desire is going to pop like a balloon. He also won’t get to keep that house longer than one episode, because it’s just a matter of time before those dealers raid the place.
This is far from the birth of Fear’s Glenn and Maggie, is what I’m saying.
Back to Madison and Friends. If she’s going to have any hope of turning this hotel into a home, she’s going to have to end the civil war within it, AND cleanse the place of Walkers, both within one episode. It sounds impossible, until Alicia stares at the big dock and gets an idea…..
Alicia, Elena, Strand and Hector begin opening doors all over the hotel, making noise to attract zombies in single file. They keep at it floor by floor, until eventually they all meet in the lobby and the line converges. Madison takes it from there and slowly walks onto the pier, noisily banging a pan. The Walkers follow.
A gigantic line of the undead soon forms on the pier as Madison slowly advances toward an opening near the edge. Down below, the others try to get an inflatable motorboat moving in time to reach her. There’s a bit of tension when it doesn’t work at first, but they eventually triumph over the waves and make it to Madison, whose stunt double takes a giant leap.
All the zombies are gone! Now the only problem the residents should have is each other, so if they can just learn to get along…..hoo boy, it’s a Kirkman picture, that is excessively unlikely. Something petty is going to come up, or someone is going to get power hungry; however it happens, it WILL happen.
The episode’s final scene is Strand having a conversation with Oscar, one of the hotel residents. Oscar had a wife who got bit, named Jessica (the other half of the title!) and she’s still around in growling form because he can’t bring himself to finish her off, even if her spirit left long ago. Strand calmly says, “Let me help Jessica,” and he walks into the room right before the credits, prepared to deliver the “help” probably in the form of something blunt.