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Much like season 2 of The Walking Dead, Fear the Walking Dead’s most recent midseason finale ended with a cleansing fire that not only destroyed a hoped-for sanctuary, but physically separated the family unit as they were emotionally pulling apart. Where do they go from here, now forced back into the barren wasteland of the dead?

For Nick, sticking (almost aggravatingly) with the lone wolf mentality, he comes face to face with God. Waking from sleep next to a pair of rotting corpses in an unfamiliar house, he stares up at a wooden cross hanging on the wall.

Sofia, one of Celia’s maids, tells Nick the deceased were friends. Outside, a kid named Juan is bouncing a soccer ball next to a parked car, and Sofia is determined to find his father. She owes it to Juan’s mother and comments that there are too many orphans in the world already.

The other servants will embark on their own journeys to find family and sanctuary, but Nick questions whether they’ll stick together and if there’s even a place for someone like Celia left. It’s as if he’s questioning his own decision to leave his family, though she notes there’s been talk of heading north to the city, where there are still those who consider the dead like Celia does.

Sofia implores Nick to come with her, warning the north is full of “la manas,” who are “the worst of men.” Nick refuses her invitation, and as a consolation is provided with a backpack of supplies, a plastic water jug, and instructions to head for the highway beyond a mountain shaped like the ridge of a woman’s back. After they says their goodbyes, Nick walks back to the corpses to coat his body in that all too familiar stench of blood.

In season 1, Madison’s initial plan was to get Nick to the desert where he would be forced to purge his system of drugs and confront his addiction. As it happens, that’s where he finds himself now.

His journey across jagged terrain and abandoned landmarks commences to the music of José González, who appropriately sings, “How low are you willing to go before reaching your selfish goals?” Upon making it to the highway, the last few guitar plucks of the song echo as he walks down the seemingly infinite stretch of concrete toward Tijuana.

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According to a sign, it’s 100 miles to the city, and Nick’s journey will be filled with physical and emotional trials. The first is a pair of abandoned cars. Nick considers himself for a moment in a rearview mirror with rosary beads (more religious imagery to complement his journey) coiled around it, his reflection sparking a flashback to rehab.

NEXT: Meet the girl of Nick’s dreams

In the flashback, Nick flirtatiously plays thumb war with a blond-haired girl, taunting her throughout. He’s trying to avoid the task at hand: rehearsing what he’ll say to his parents when he sees them in three weeks. His friend suggests starting with his dad, though Nick says he’d much prefer his mom. Ignoring the bait, she refocuses his attention.

While he explains his dad hasn’t done much of anything to anger him, the girl pushes for a reaction. Nick nearly breaks down in tears as he shouts about how his dad was never emotionally present: “You used to be there and then you stopped. I guess the world is too much for you.”

The memory breaks as the sun sets over the desert. Walking down a dirt road bordered by barbed wire, Nick comes across a one-level home. A brief search reveals no one present, so he decides to start a small fire and camp for the night. However, he’s later jolted out of sleep by a woman with a baseball bat.

She’s hitting and screaming in Spanish at Nick as her daughter cowers in the corner, clearly frightened by a stranger infiltrating their home. Nick tries to explain he meant no harm, but the language barrier only exacerbates the woman’s fear and aggression. Inured from the blows, he stumbles off into the night without his supplies.

He finds himself back on the highway, which is littered with more abandoned vehicles. He stops to lightly toy with a walker reaching out to him from a driver’s seat, indicating his scent camouflage has worn off. She chomps at him as he fearlessly opens the door to grab a nearly empty water bottle as another walker stumbles toward him in the distance.

A radio lies on the car’s dashboard. Again ignoring the walker’s advances, Nick fetches the device and fiddles with the white noise of the channels. The sound is quickly drowned out by a Jeep pulling up to the scene.

Nick ducks down behind a car as four men with guns and bats (presumably the la manas Sophia spoke of) exit the vehicle. They make quick work of the straggler walker and proceed to search the cars. An old man is found struggling to breath among the wreckage, and one of the goons impales him through the eye as they all share a laugh.

The radio reveals Nick’s location with a loud blast of static, forcing him to sprint off the road and through the brush as the men open fire. When he believes he’s safe, Nick stops to catch his breath, but he’s faced with another stretch of barren, open land.

Now lumbering along out of dehydration, Nick uses his shirt to cushion his skin against a cactus as he struggles to consume the water within. Tragically, the plant is bone dry. His dirtied, bloodied form hunches over animal-like to cut into the cactus with a sharp rock. He attempts to eat the innards, but easily vomits everything back up.

Desperate, he urinates into his own hand before ingesting it back into his body. He shutters at the taste before dusk welcomes another night. Shivering from the temperature drop, Nick sits down against the skeleton of an abandoned car, but his sleep brings him back to rehab.

NEXT: Ghosts of girlfriend’s past

Nick dreams of the girl again. This time they are both waiting for their parents to pick them up. Nick jokes that the girl must be rich when he sees her mom and dad, while brushing off the fact that only Madison showed up for him. He wishes the girl luck, to which she replies, “All will be well in the garden.”

Before Nick can go, a woman informs him that his mom needs to speak with him privately. Madison slowly tells him in a separate room that his dad isn’t coming because he got into a head-on car accident while leaving work. He’s dead. Nick initially retracts from Madison’s touch, but she clutches her son as he wails in pain. The girl tells her parents to wait a moment as she stares at the scene through the door’s glass window.

When he wakes, Nick finds two snarling dogs ready to pounce. One tears into his leg, though he’s able to bash the animal away with a rock. He struggles to climb up to the car’s roof as the other tries pulling him down by his pant leg. As Nick gasps at the gash, the dogs go silent. A pack of walkers shamble toward the car, likely drawn from the barks.

The animals attack the dead, who descend upon the animals as whimpers pierce the desert. The pack eventually refocuses on Nick when his movement causes the roof beneath him to squeak. He prepares for their impending assault, but the pack is drawn away by car honks and gun shots in the distance.

After scrambling off the roof, Nick hobbles over to a dog corpse and satiates himself on what meat remains on its ribcage. A single walker crawls toward him on the ground, and Nick sees this as an opportunity to grab the deceased’s belt, which he then uses as a brace for his leg.

With a fresh coat of walker blood, Nick now limps along with the walker pack. His vision begins to blur as he falls into a brief hallucination. The walkers seem to say, “Come with us,” and he sees one of them as the zombified girl from his flashbacks. “I’ll take you home,” she says before Nick snaps back to reality. Another sign indicates he’s now 40 miles from Tijuana.

The pack makes its way to the source of the sounds: the four men from the Jeep. They exit the car and begin shooting at the walkers. Bullets rip into the dead around him, but Nick keeps lurching forward. One of the men in a black tank top takes off his sunglasses and catches Nick’s stare. His face curdles with rage at the one who got away, though his ammo falls to the ground in an attempt to fire.

He doesn’t have enough time to reload and save himself before the walkers are close enough to bite into him. Nick watches a few steps behind as his undead herd lays waste to the men, though one is able to get away in the Jeep.

NEXT: Reaching the promised land

On the road again, the walkers continue their trek, but a mysterious woman eyes Nick from a distance with binoculars. The two men with her identify her as Luciana. “It’s not him,” she says in Spanish, ready to move on. The man she calls Francisco pleads with her to help Nick, noting how he’s able to walk among the dead. When Nick collapses on the road from exhaustion, Luciana takes that as a sign of his death and the trio moves on.

Nick’s third flashback is another memory of the girl. She wakes up in the drug house from the pilot episode to see Nick reading a book he got from his dad. He describes the main message of the story, “When you hold onto something for too long, you corrupt it.” The girl jokes it’s a page-turner, which Nick notes is something his mom would say.

Based on the setting and Nick’s clothes, we can assume this girl is Gloria, whom Nick found turned into a walker in the pilot… which means that Gloria died after shooting up during this moment from the flashback.

Mother Nature offers Nick a gentler awakening this time, rainfall, which he gleefully drinks in. Moments later, we find him in a city (presumably Tijuana). Dogs bark and yip from apartment balconies as he makes his way first to a pharmacy touting a sign that poetically proclaims, “Drugs here.”

Finding nothing there, he makes his way to a barbershop, where he grabs duct tape to bandage his wound. Luciana appears at the door holding a gun; she’s followed by Francisco and the other man. Nick fearfully raises his hands in surrender, though they mean him no harm. She attempts to explain that the tape will only make it worse, but Nick doesn’t fully understand Spanish. He does know a few words and is able to explain the bite is from a dog and not a walker, and ask for water.

“I know someone who can help,” Luciana says as she leads Nick out of the shop. We find him next in an infirmary. The sound of kids playing is heard outside of the closed room, but a man walks down from a spiral staircase distracting Nick’s curiosity.

The man examines Nick’s wound and explains he could’ve died from infection. “I wouldn’t mind that,” Nick responds. The man says Luciana called him brave, but he now sees him as foolish. “Death is not to be feared, but it shouldn’t be pursued,” he says. “There’s a difference.”

The two continue their conversation, during which Nick says his goal for journeying so far is to find a place where the dead aren’t monsters. To that, the man leads Nick out of the room, revealing a walled-in community filled with people. Nick smiles as he gazes upon street vendors offering various food, laundry, and other services, while a man is seen boxing on a nearby rooftop and children play soccer in the streets.

As the camera zooms out to reveal the full scope of this encampment, the echoes of The Walking Dead become more irksome. As Rick’s group initially found safety in the wilderness, they were forced on a cross-country journey that led to the CDC, which ended in a fiery explosion. Madison & co. followed a similar trajectory, moving from the dictatorship of the military through to Celia’s mansion, which met a similar fate.

Now we find Nick in Andrea’s circumstance: After separating from his group, he finds himself in a seemingly idyllic society apart from the apocalypse. There’s still a great deal left to be explained, but fans of this franchise know all too well that sanctuary is never what it seems.

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