Season 1, Episode 4, “Not Fade Away”

This post contains spoilers for Sunday’s episode.

The national guard occupation intensified and people started disappearing this week, as Daniel’s worst fears about the military’s arrival started to look prophetic.

First they came for Hector, the invalid neighbor who was also  Nick’s unwitting dope supplier. His evacuation scanned as a mission of mercy but soon the dragnet broadened.  Doug the delicate neighbor was removed because of his emotional fragility; Griselda for her bum leg, ostensibly to get surgery;  Nick for his opiate dependence.

Last week we talked about Daniel, the hard-bitten self-preservationist, and Travis, the trusting humanitarian, representing opposing perspectives. In the disparity we see a cultural distinction — Daniel’s third-world distrust in the powers that be, based on dark experience, versus Travis’s sunny American belief that things will work out in the end.

The bad news is that Daniel has been right, at least so far. Despite the government doctor’s prior assurances, he had to watch as soldiers took away his wife under cover of night. The campaign of removal to a mysterious “headquarters,” justified as being in the best interest of those the troops excised, resembled the story Daniel told Madison about the people who had been taken from his village and killed.

The good news, if you can call it that, is that by the end of the episode, Travis appeared to have finally seen the light. Many lights, in fact, as gunfire flickered in the distance. It was presumably troops taking down the holdouts on the hill, whom Travis himself is likely to have condemned by revealing them to the officer in charge. (It’s safe to say that, with all the light-signaling throughout the episode, they were actual people and not walkers.)

The executions, and Travis’s apparent awakening, provided a tidy, if macabre, bookend for an episode that began with Chris’s spying the signals through his camera and Travis blithely jogging around the “safe zone” as if the world weren’t coming apart.

The man would throw a parade for the soldiers if he could, Chris notes. We quickly see that Travis is a quisling, the guy the officers send out to calm down those less comfortable with occupation and imprisonment. (His ex Liza later tops him in this department, becoming an active collaborator.) “Don’t worry,” he tells his family after his jog, “they’re gonna get it sorted.” He was talking about the stuttering power grid but also meant everything else, because implausibly optimistic is pretty much his default state.

If for some reason Mr. Brightside isn’t a changed man next week, then I promise to throw a parade myself for whichever walker eats him. I get the value of positive thinking, both in life and in this story. Travis is trying to keep his family, and probably himself, from losing it, and the show needs a true believer to embody the inconceivability of a total collapse of order.

But at this point the man’s seen a family friend run over repeatedly without dying; cops eat one another during a riot; hospital patients withstand gunfire fusillades; his old friend eat a dog and then try to eat him; and a beloved neighbor growl through the fence and attack her own husband. I realize Travis is meant to be flawed — he plays at being a “man of the people,” as Madison tells him, but disregards his own son. But there’s a time for optimism, and then there’s a time when a character’s dogged, sunny faith becomes absurd and tedious.

“It is gonna be O.K. That’s all that you have to say,” he tells Doug. No, Travis, that’s all you have to say. The rest of us can see that, apologies to Marsellus Wallace, things are pretty far from O.K.

Back in reality, Madison made her own fact-finding mission beyond the perimeter. What she found was a number of executed, yet seemingly uninfected people and storm-troopers patrolling the streets. When she relayed that to Daniel, he told her the story about the people kidnapped from his village and killed, and recalled how his father had urged him not to have hatred in his heart.

“He said men do these things not because of you,” Daniel said. “They do evil because of fear. At that moment I realized my father is a fool for believing there is a difference. ”

It felt like a title drop, one that cleverly refocused the show to suggest that the real apocalypse at issue isn’t the walker terror, but society’s self-consuming response to it.

A few thoughts while we plan our escape

• Let’s see, all of the remaining principals have loved ones at “headquarters” now. Can a liberation expedition be far behind?

• Would Madison really jeopardize her family and everyone else by cutting a walker-sized hole in the fence? That bit seemed a little off.

• So now that her mother’s been seized, does that mean Ofelia can stop making out with the soldier in order to get medicine?

• Frank Dillane has done a nice job playing Nick. He conveys the feral junkie essence without being ham-handed about it, and evinces a genuine charm that, one senses, has allowed Nick to get away with plenty for most of his life. Nick’s an engaging character. That doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy it when Madison finally lost it and smacked him all over the place.