Fear the Walking Dead recap: 'This Land Is Your Land' 

Ruben Blades, Mercedes Mason, Cliff Curtis

Alicia is on the ground, resting her head in her hands. The camera catches her reflection in a pool of blood — blood she was forced to shed by no choice of her own. She’s catching her breath, horrified by what her own hands have done, unwilling to proceed to the final act.

She’s been put in an impossible position: The young woman, on the cusp of adulthood, has been forced to be a beacon of hope for the ranchers, who are condemned to death. It’s a silent struggle, sold subtly by actress Alycia Debnam-Carey and made more poignant by the scenes that happened just moments earlier: Troy, with Nick in the passenger seat, recklessly plows their truck through the horde of walkers and crashes into an RV. Their rescue attempt is failing and they’re vulnerable, but they laugh as they’re able to get inside a helicopter to catch the briefest moments of safety, while the dead try to force their way inside.

One Clark child is forced to not just be an adult but a killer, and one might as well be palling around.

In the hours leading up to Alicia’s bloody moment of reckoning, the dead roam outside, but the airtight pantry isn’t much safer. Ofelia and Crazy Dog quickly learn that there’s no air coming through the vents. Alicia calculates that, if they can’t fix the problem, they have approximately two hours before they’re all poisoned by the carbon dioxide. Ofelia and Crazy Dog are the ones to crawl through the vents to kickstart the airflow, but it’ll take them hours before they can get back — which brings about the harsh reality. If they kill off those who’ve already been bitten, they can buy themselves a little more time.

Crazy Dog thinks he’ll have to force executions, but when Blake reveals his bite (Alicia spotted it earlier while looking for food supplies), the infected from both Broke Jaw and Black Hat volunteer as tributes. They even find a box of morphine and syringes to put them all to sleep. Actually killing them, however, is another matter. It’s hard for Alicia to confront her neighbors about their predicament and ask them to take their own lives to protect the many. It’s even harder for her to talk them down as they beg and plead for another hour to live. It’s nearly impossible for her to be the one to actually take their lives.

It’s in this moment that I finally understand Alicia, whose arcs can come across as background noise at times. She has always felt like a consolation prize to her mother. Her brother, she says, was always the favorite; everybody loved him, even when his drug problem came to light. She has always felt like she’s been forced into unfair situations but tasted few of the fruits of her labor. She struggled with this when it was just her and her mother at the hotel, and Nick coming back into the picture made these issues harder to ignore.

“Are you ready?” she asks the first to volunteer, an elderly man from Black Hat. It’s more a question to herself. He’s already accepted his fate, but she’s the one who must drive the knife in the back of his skull. When it’s done, she bursts through dangling transparent plastic strips — evoking the image of a slaughterhouse — and finds a hiding place in the back of the pantry to allow herself a moment to cry and panic. An older woman comes to her side, not to console her but to ease her back into focus. Those people who are prepared to lay down their lives have done their part, she says. It’s now time to do hers.

When the floor runs thick enough with blood to catch Alicia’s reflection, she’s left with only Blake to kill. That’s the curse of being a survivor, of being the “strong” ones in this world. Even when you find a place — a sanctuary — that you think will last, everything falls, and it just falls faster in these harsh conditions. Death will come over and over again to take your friends and loved ones. It’s up to you to decide whether to keep going. But Alicia’s hope is dwindling. She’s lost so much and, again, finds herself alone, bearing the weight of the dead and the thought that she’s the one who had to claim their lives.

“It’s okay. It’s gonna be okay,” she tells a whimpering Blake, who asks forgiveness for his past wrongs. Her eyes, however, slowly reveal her truth as his life slips away: She’s not sure if it will be okay.

Outside, Nick doesn’t allow Troy time to bury his brother because there’s no time to give. The plan is to reach the ranch’s fuel reserve and blow it up, hoping that the explosion will draw the horde away so they can extract those in the pantry. They fire off an initial blast as a distraction. But as Troy barrels through the walkers, he delights in the chaos of the blood splattering the windshield and the walker dangling from his hood. They crash and are forced to head for the helicopter.

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