Fear the Walking Dead recap: 'Burning in Water, Drowning in Flame' 

Ruben Blades, Mercedes Mason, Cliff Curtis

is a collection of poems written by Charles Bukowski from 1955 to 1973. The assemblage tackles a range of topics, especially gambling, drinking, and women. It’s also the book Jake Otto gives to Alicia as an admittedly unconventional post-sex gift. The title itself is a contradiction: water doesn’t burn, it drowns; flames don’t drown, they burn. It’s this quandary that makes it appropriate for Jake’s discussion about the importance of art in the apocalypse, set in an episode that tries to make sense of its own dualities within Broke Jaw Ranch.

Luciana remarks to Nick that there’s beauty in the death of an elderly couple that opens the hour. The colony awakens in the dead of night to try to douse a fire set by Russ Brown, who finds that his wife, Martha, died in her sleep and turned into a walker. Embracing her for one last dance, he fires a gun into both of their brains, and their fall causes a lamp to shatter and spread its flames to the rest of the house. “Save the water. Let it burn,” Jeremiah says, echoing the episode’s title. To Luciana, it’s “sad but beautiful” because they were “together ’til the end.”

The next morning, Madison tries to quell her children’s fears and argues that there’s safety in putting herself in danger. She’s about to embark on a mission with Troy (the same guy whose eye she nearly plucked out) and his militiamen to find out what happened to their missing envoy. Given Troy’s unpredictably volatile actions, Nick and Alicia urge her to consider another way to prove their dedication to the ranch. Yet, she says, “The more we understand this family, the safer we are.”

Daniel and Victor are another fun pairing. After the kerfuffle at the dam, Daniel left Lola to go back to the hotel in search of Ofelia. We already know she’s not there, nor is anyone else from his original group. So it’s only a matter of time before the already hostile father realizes Victor’s verbal trickery and retaliates. Nevertheless, Victor tries to keep up the ruse while managing his frenemy’s expectations.

Back at the ranch, Alicia finds Jake in his room after having earlier been oblivious to his pain. The elderly couple who died were among the “founding fathers” of the community, and Alicia only found out through her Bible study buddy: another contradiction, as the party posse masquerades as a religious study group. She’s tormented by the thought that she and her family will never be the same as they were before the outbreak, and either because of an influx of emotion or just for the heck of it (Jake is the hottest thing to come around the apocalypse in a while), she hooks up with the nice Otto brother.

collection as she’s getting dressed. You can see some of the annotations he made on the pages: “We are strangers in an empty place, we are kings in our little empire. All this, it happens inside and outside of us,” reads one of them. She rebuffs the gesture, saying she once liked art, but now she doesn’t see the point.

While on the road, Madison and Troy come across a flipped bus from a correctional facility in California. The rest of the group wants to move on, but Troy is itching to massacre some walkers, who are congregating around the collapsed vehicle. Madison sides with him and ends up proving herself as a physical force. The soldier who questioned her skills back at the ranch now apologizes, though he did have to fire an arrow into a walker’s skull when she was caught off guard.

Jeremiah finds Nick at the Browns’ burned house, trying to fix it up by scrubbing the ash off the walls. The Otto patriarch once lived in the house, noting that Jake was born in one of the rooms, but he gave it to the Browns when it proved “too humble” for his second wife. Nick points out the next contradiction when Jeremiah finds a pistol he gifted the Browns and calls it “a beautiful gun.” He finds beauty in the tool, even though it’s an instrument of death. Nick questions whether that’s the same dogma he instilled in Troy; Jeremiah finds the beauty in his sociopathic son, too. Jeremiah failed Troy during his alcoholic binges, and he doesn’t intend to leave him behind again.

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