'Fear the Walking Dead' Brain-Dead Move of the Week: (Please Don't) Take Me to Church

Every week on Fear the Walking Dead, someone does something stupid that needlessly endangers the lives of themselves and others. Here, we commemorate those decisions in the hopes that they won’t be repeated. But of course, we know they will be.

During the Walking Dead season, we like to highlight (and mock) a particularly dumb move by one of the characters each episode that puts their lives in danger. We call it the Brain-Dead Move of the Week — and it happens like clockwork. But we weren’t sure we’d be able to carry on the tradition with the new TWD spinoff, Fear the Walking Dead. After watching Sunday night’s Fear premiere, though, we realized we shouldn’t have worried; the zombie apocalypse hasn’t hit yet, so these people are EVEN DUMBER.

Related: Take a Bite Out of Our ‘Fear the Walking Dead’ Recaps

Take Travis, for instance. Travis is a high school English teacher who seems to be relatively intelligent. But there’s something about a zombie apocalypse that turns relatively intelligent people into blundering idiots. (Because, of course, if everyone always did the smart thing on these shows, we wouldn’t see anyone get eaten by zombies. And what fun would that be? About as fun as Fear the Walking Dead, we suppose.)

Anyway, when Travis visits his girlfriend’s heroin-addled, James Franco-looking son Nick in the hospital, Nick tells him he witnessed his friend Gloria eating a person’s face off in an abandoned church. What does Travis do with this admittedly startling information? Alert the authorities? Investigate in a safe and rational manner?

Of course not! He goes to the church. At night. By himself.

Now Travis did at least bring a flashlight; we’ll give him that. But again, he’s a high school English teacher! He’s barely equipped to handle a fight in the cafeteria, let alone a full-blown zombie outbreak. What was he planning to do, educate the zombies on the difference between a simile and a metaphor?

But there he was, opening creaky doors and venturing down dimly lit hallways, even chasing one paranoid drug fiend out the door. At one point, he spotted a worrying blood stain on the wall. Did he immediately leave at that point, as any of us would?

Of course not! He even yelled, attracting more attention to himself! The guy might as well have been wearing a “Zombie Chow” T-shirt. (Actually, that sounds like a pretty cool idea for a T-shirt. We would wear that.)

Finally, Travis slipped and ran his hand through a grisly patch of human remains. A fine time to exit, we’d say!

But even then, he kept searching, long after any sane person would’ve run away screaming. He did manage to get away unharmed… but only by sheer dumb luck. If this were The Walking Dead, is there any doubt this guy would be zombie chow by now?

Later in the episode, Travis taught his students about author Jack London, and his tales of “man vs. nature” survival: “London’s trying to teach us how not to die.” Well, if your decisions this week are any gauge, Travis, you’d better go back and read some more… because you haven’t learned a damn thing.

Runners-Up: That nurse, for loosening one of Nick’s restraints, leading to his escape. Yes, we know he’s cute and all, but that’s got to be against hospital protocol… Madison, for not listening to that acne-scarred student who can see the zombie apocalypse coming. It makes sense that she wouldn’t completely believe him, but her assertion that if there were zombies, “the authorities would tell us”? That might be the most brain-dead thing we’ve heard so far.

Fear the Walking Dead airs Sundays at 9 p.m. on AMC.