If you haven't watched the third episode of Fear the Walking Dead's fourth season yet, be warned: there are major SPOILERS below.
That episode aired last night, and in the final moments there was a death that totally blindsided me. This was a death I never expected to see in this show, let alone to see it just dropped into the third episode of a season. A death that was as major as a death could get on this series. The character who I saw as the heart of Fear the Walking Dead, and who was the person we first followed into this zombie-filled world like we followed Rick Grimes into it on Fear's companion series The Walking Dead, is now dead.
Rest in peace, Nick Clark.
My first thought was that new showrunners Andrew Chambliss and Ian Goldberg are either out of their minds or are actively trying to change Fear the Walking Dead into something completely different than the show we've come to know over the previous three seasons, but during an interview with The Hollywood Reporter the pair revealed that it actually wasn't their decision to kill off Nick Clark. The death was written into the show at the request of actor Frank Dillane.
Chambliss said,
(The decision to kill Nick) actually goes back to season three, before Ian and I even came aboard. Frank Dillane had asked the producers and AMC if he could leave the show, because he wanted to pursue other opportunities. One of the first things we were tasked with when we came on to run season four was to really find a story that would give Nick a fitting sendoff. He's been with the show from day one, so it was very important to us and to Frank to find a death for him that was emotional and one that would ripple forward throughout the storytelling."
We've seen how Nick's story ends, and it was quite a tragic ending, but thanks to the fact that this season is cutting back and forth between two different times, providing information about the substantial time jump between seasons through flashbacks, we haven't seen the last of Nick on the show. Goldberg said,
It's safe to say that there's a lot more story to tell with Nick. … There's more story to be told with Nick that we think will provide some emotional context for why he's such a different person when we find him in the present day story, than how we've seen him in the Diamond."
If Chambliss and Goldberg had chosen to remove Nick from the show on their own, I would be very concerned about the rest of the season. Knowing that Dillane wanted to leave Fear makes the death more acceptable… but it's still going to be very strange to watch this show without Nick being a major part of the story.
I wish Dillane the best of luck with the other opportunities he wants to pursue.