Z Nation Episode 1.09 Die, Zombie, Die... Again

Mack and Addy. Addy and Mack. Macddy. Addack. They've been absent the last few episodes, but now we see them trying to catch up to the rest of the team with the help of Citizen Z via a nice little montage set to Nancy Sinatra. What could be better?

There's some tension between these two, and it's definitely got a lot to do with those spooky flashbacks Addy's been having. Finally, she decides to tell Mack about it: it's an image of a dark place, a bad Z, and a guy who looks suspiciously like Mack. Could these be flash-forwards?

Mack tries to alleviate the tension by telling her about his fantasy date with her and Addy ruins the mood by telling him they'll never work as a couple. Counterpoint from Mack: They've kept each other alive. They realize they've never actually been on a proper date and while Mack goes off to try and make that happen, Addy falls asleep.

Suddenly, Mack wakes up to the sound of Addy screaming. When he rushes to find her, he finds a snake, some zombie bodies and a terrifying Z who has Addy's whack-a-mole baseball bat stuck to him. Just as Mack is crushed by a falling wall and eaten by a zombie, he wakes up! It was all a dream, but wait ... now is Addy gone for real?

Mack gets up and goes through the dream he's already had with the snake, the zombie bodies and the big zombie dude that has Addy's baseball bat stuck in him and her necklace in his mouth. And this time, Mack traps the Big Z under the falling wall ... and then dies and wakes up again.

And then it happens again.

Mack is caught in an endless cycle of recurring dreams, each one getting him a little further along his existential nightmare as he learns from the mistakes and missteps he made in the previous one.

It turns out that the big zombie is trying to keep Mack from getting behind a door in a warehouse, but that's just part of the dream, too. When Mack wakes up, he tells Addy about all this madness. When they hear a zombie, they run after it with intent to kill, though instead they discover the door from the dream. Addy investigates.

Behind the door is another wall, and as they try to break it down, the zombie attacks and bites Addy's necklace off. Mack kills the zombie (maybe? Is this another dream?) and then tends to Addy. But then the zombie turns up again. And Mack wakes up. Again.

In this next dream go-round, Mack goes back inside the warehouse and goes through the door himself and descends into a basement, where he finds a wounded small boy and kills some sort of terrible zombie that emerges from the shadows. He's awoken by Addy, who tells him she knows he was having a nightmare and shouting "Why won't you die?!" Mack asks her where her necklace came from in the first place. And then she wakes up. It's a dream within a dream within a dream! And boy it just keeps going.

In the final (maybe?) dream sequence, Addy whacks the bib zombie, goes through the door, descends into the basement and sees the wounded small boy lying on the floor. She's then attacked by a woman in a bathroom ... who turns out to be Addy's mom.

Thusly it is revealed that Addy had to kill her own mother. That's why we went through these dreams within dreams -- to explore and release Addy's horrible memory and terrible secret.