Fear the Walking Dead takes an unexpected path Sunday night and it leads to paydirt.

Returning at 9 p.m. ET to start the second half of its second season, Fear puts an hour-long hold on its increasingly tense central story to focus on Nick Clark (Frank Dillane), who got separated from the pack a while back.

Nick survived, fans will remember, by disguising himself as an infected zombie, smearing himself with blood and guts and lurching along with the herd.

It was a high-risk strategy for Nick, just as devoting an entire episode to Nick is a high-risk strategy for a show that has been accused at times of advancing its story too slowly.

But Nick is a good character with which to take this chance, since he’s led a high-risk life in general, including his years as a serious teenage drug addict.

Whether this makes him value life less or more has been an open question, and Sunday’s episode provides a few additional clues, though perhaps no definite answers.

It also doesn’t provide any clear-cut answers about where Nick wants to go, though he may be headed in the direction of where he thinks his mother Madison (Kim Dickens) and the rest of the family may have gone.

He’s an elusive character, Nick, and it shouldn’t be any spoiler to say that serves him well as he tries to avoid both zombies and survivors who see no downside to eliminating competition for what resources remain in what’s left of civilization.

Spending an hour on any character constitutes a bold move for almost any TV series, and while Nick hasn’t exactly been an outlier, Fear the Walking Dead is an ensemble effort that for some viewers will just extend the summer hiatus tease by making us wait another week to learn what’s happening to the larger crowd from the boat.

But as the parent Walking Dead has shown, strengthening our understanding of and investment in single characters can ultimately deepen our appreciation of the broader story as well.

This episode of Fear isn’t a monologue. Nick meets people on his pathway and we see others in flashbacks.

In some ways Nick also doesn’t come off as a unique individual caught in this insane situation. He faces many of the same obstacles and reacts in many of the same ways that everyone else would react.

He also runs into the same quotient of luck, some of it good and some of it not so good.

Not surprisingly, the following weeks will let us know what’s happening with the rest of our desperate band, whose optimism about safe havens fades each time the next one turns out to be something other.

Meanwhile, Nick’s travels might make a few fans drum their fingers. But in the larger picture, it keeps the drums rolling.