Geeky TV commentary - Fear the Walking Dead 1.5

Fear the Walking Dead airs at 9pm on AMC Sunday nights until next week (the season finale) and then will be replaced by The Walking Dead.

Do you guys remember when Flash Forward was on and their main problem wasn't the concept or the characters, but that they kept looking at and focusing on the ones that had very little going on while people off screen kept having much more interesting stuff happen to them? That's what I kept thinking of as this episode unfurled.

See, Ofelia's soldier boyfriend was captured and was being tortured by her father to get the information needed to save her mother. Did we get to focus on Ofelia and what that must be like? No, we focused on Travis trying to talk to the soldier we already know is a raging a-hole and not likely to help them at all. Even when Travis is on his way with them to the Facility and gets stuck in the car while the soldiers get in a firefight, we were stuck with him. It was atmospheric how he could only see snippets of what was happening and could only hear people dying on the radio, but it wasn't story--not the way the slow-mo drive-by of the hospital the other episode was. It was a perfect chance to take us in with the soldiers and show us what's really going on outside the fence and with the military, but nothing really happened to anyone we know there.

Or we were with Alicia. Her mother went looking for her, found the soldier boyfriend in the basement, and promptly forgot that she had a daughter or a story of her own, and, from what we can see, basically sat at a table in another room while all that was happening. Meanwhile, Alicia and Chris went and busted up a rich person's abandoned house up the road.

Nick was in a cage, going through withdrawal again, with a guy who talked Doug The Neighbor into a breakdown and then turned around and saved Nick, but we only got two little scenes of that, and there's not much indication of what's going on with that except that the dude has a plan and thinks he needs Nick.

Griselda was off-screen, then unconscious in a cage with a missing leg, then feverish, then dead. Liza had to put her down so she wouldn't get up, and like barely a handful of moments were spent on that.

The focus was in all the wrong places. It's the second to last episode, and it feels like they're holding back, and that's annoying. Don't save your best stuff for the finale, show, give something good in every episode.

What we did learn this ep, though:

• Daniel is almost definitely a retired hitman, and definitely used to be a torturer
• Griselda knew about whatever he was and seems to have defied someone about it
• The doctors definitely know what's going on, but they apparently keep disappearing
• The soldiers had a plan to abandon everyone, and it goes into operation in the morning
• They're already leaving late at night when Alicia and Chris are heading home, and they don't so much as blink at two kids out after curfew
• There's a plant to "humanely dispose of..." something
• Daniel found a stadium PACKED with zoms that will almost definitely cause the first real havoc in the finale, if we're lucky
• Travis is STILL to soft-hearted to survive in the wild now, and can't stop seeing zombies as people and somehow it hasn't killed him yet
• This family was all manner of fragile before the end of the world or be so fractured and disjointed so quickly now

We already knew the soldiers were awful people. Except for that one, apparently, who looks like he's going to get as abandoned as the civilians there in the fence. It would be useful if he stayed with the group, but will he want to, after being tortured for his information when he was the only nice soldier we ever saw at all?

It feels almost like the characters are not characters so much as they're pawns being moved around by the plot. Maddie is a self-possessed and reasonable potential leader--except when she's not because that would get in the way. Alicia is the only one with a heart--except for when she's entirely gone. Chris is the activist--except when he's also gone, and busy whining and complaining instead of doing anything useful like he was one episode ago. The show as a whole seems to be drawing things out and pulling punches and looking in the wrong place. It's possible that this is intentional--that in the finale they'll all find out they are the ones focusing on the wrong things and looking in the wrong directions, and then the second season will be more focused because they are...

But if that's the plan, it's awfully risky. And it's very annoying to sit through. The parts that are good really just make it more annoying when the rest of it is so bland and contrived. Maybe this series would have done better as a four-episode, or three-episode intro, and then picked up again next season with more episodes after they get out of the Safe Zone and have to actually scavenge and fight and make choices and keep moving.

What did you guys think of this episode? Do you think the finale will change the context? Share in the comments, or come join me on Twitter!


Previous episodes of Fear the Walking Dead (still don't like the name):

• Episode 1.1
• Episode 1.2
• Episode 1.3
• Episode 1.4

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Geeky TV commentary - Fear the Walking Dead 1.4

Fear the Walking Dead airs at 9pm on AMC Sunday nights.

It feels like Fear the Walking Dead is finally coming together. Which is ironic on an episode where mostly nothing much happened until the last fifteen minutes or so, but they did nothing-happening better this time--it was a nothing-happening where people were asking questions and not trusting the answers they were given. A nothing-happening where people were trying to find things out for themselves.

And there was enough of a pause in the crazy that people could start thinking--which was what was seriously missing from the earlier episodes. Now, it's the characters who are being withheld from, not the ones doing the withholding, and it's much less annoying when shifty soldiers and doctors are obviously not telling everything they know than it is when characters we see are not saying anything at all even though there's no reason not to.

So here's the rundown of events:

Nick has been stealing morphine from a terminally ill neighbor who Liza has been helping with her nurse-skillz, and claiming that he's fine now. Which leads to the Mysterious Doctor that shows up putting him on the list of sick and injured because she doesn't believe that he's cured after she checks him out.

Liza has been helping all the sick and injured in the neighborhood, but the doctor knows she's not an actua nurse--though they didn't say whether she's full on faking it, or if she lost her certification somehow, or if she's just, like, partially trained or something. At the end of the ep, when things actually happened, the doctor strong-arms her into coming with, and Maddie is mad at her because they took Nick, too.

Griselda has a terrible infection and needs surgery on her foot, and they take her, too. Daniel doesn't trust them, and when he goes, he makes Maddie promise that she'll take care of Ofelia if he doesn't come back, because when he was a kid, he saw exactly what happens when you don't question government soldiers taking people away. They all die.

Meanwhile, Ofelia has taken up with one of the soldiers, but he gets really pissy when she asks with help with her mom before the doctor shows, so is any of them really interested in each other?

A neighbor has a breakdown, refuses to submit to the health tests again, and then runs away while his wife and kids aren't in the room. Travis, who thought he talked him down, tries to find him and only finds his car outside the fence the soldiers have put up in the "one of twelve safe zones". The soldier says he was taken to Headquarters to get help, and even though that was before the sick and injured were taken away, we're all pretty sure* that he's dead or locked up.

And Chris saw a flashing light across the valley and thinks it's someone out there where the soldiers say there's no more people, and that they're looking for help. Travis says it's nothing, because he trusts the authorities more than anyone else, it seems, but Chris tells Maddie, and she believes him. She goes out to see what's on the other side of the fence and finds dead bodies all over, just left in the streets--infected, but also totally ordinary people, gunned down and left there. And whole abandoned neighborhoods. Which is probably why she takes Daniel seriously when he talks about what happens when you trust governments.

Oh, and Alicia found a note that Susan left for her husband (before she killed herself? before she was turned but after she was attacked?) and realizes, finally, that her boyfriend is probably gone for good, and then uses a needles to self-tattoo that thing he drew on her arm, which is likely to give her tetanus or an infection, which, of course, will not be good in this world.

And the last scene is Travis looking across the valley--and seeing and hearing machine gun fire from where the flashing light was.

The episode was slow, but it was a slow that was going somewhere, and it was one that made sense, since it's now been nine days since the soldiers showed up and there's still only power a few hours a day, and no phones, and up until that lady showed up, no doctors. More than a week of living under military law, and nothing had been done that they'd promised yet.

Who wants to bet that they're basically freelancing and that the gov has already fallen or withdrawn to safety and left everyone to live or die as they can on their own?

It feels like the soldiers--who pulled people out of their homes at night instead of during the day, to take them for "help"--know enough of how the virus works that they're weeding out the weak, the sick, the injured in a sort of culling of the herd before someone can die at home and start a new outbreak. But they're such assholes about it, that it doesn't seem like they have public safety in mind so much as maybe power-plays and maybe something like experimentation?

They should have found a way to bring Tobias with them; he knew how to put whispers and clues together to realize what was actually going on, and he probably could have warned them that stuff was getting serious before it got to people being taken in the night like this. Maybe he'll show up again at the end of the season (which is only in two more episodes, really), and drop an info-bomb that changes everything on them.

It was looking like Liza and Maddie might forge a bond that would make them the team that leads the group--which would have been awesome since Travis is too soft-hearted and Daniel just wants to keep to himself and the rest of the guys are kids. But now Maddie is convinces that Nick was taken because of Liza, so that's not gonna happen soon. Instead, I'm hoping that they realize that the government facility is not a good place, and find out what's really going on, and then Nick, Liza, One-Legged Griselda, and maybe one or two other people along the way (Tobias!) team up to break out and get back to their families, and then everyone hits the road like they said they were going to all along.

Through all the slow parts of this ep, it's hard not to look at everyone and weigh how they'd do officially in an apocalypse team. Should we just take them all? That might be full of liabilities--though hopefully the kids will prove to be more flexible than the adults and not be among those liabilities since there's so many of them. Should we take the ones who would be most useful? Because that would leave Travis, probably, and Griselda, which would also leave Ofelia and Daniel who wouldn't leave her, and it's almost definite that Daniel is the tank of this team, as soon as he decides he needs to fight for them. He's tough, and he has a history that includes violence, even if it wasn't his own.

They've said we're not going to get the full apocalypse here in the first season; but it finally feels like something is reliably going to happen, and like things are moving forward. People are coming up with survival tactics, not just running around like headless chickens. Some of them probably would have in reality, but not all of them, and it was annoying to watch characters who were only reacting; now, they're finally acting on their own, in different directions and with different but dovetailing directions, and as they actually do things, it'll open up that world that's so far sort of claustrophobically small. With the phones down (probably intentional, I'm betting, to force info-free isolation) and no radios but the ones in the control of the soldiers, they've had no way to know what's going on in the wider world, and that's made the story super-small and without a lot of wider implications. But now that they're out there in the world, finding stuff out, and hopefully comparing notes when they get home, their personal stories will really start to tell the wider story better!

What did you guys think of the fourth of six episodes? How do you think the first season is going? Share in the comments below, or come talk to me on Twitter!




NOTE:
*"We all" meaning "twitter".

Geeky TV commentary - Fear the Walking Dead 1.3

Fear the Walking Dead airs at 9pm on Sunday nights on AMC.

Finally something is happening that actually moves the story!

Travis and co are in the babershop for all of, like, five minutes (though they mention at least two hours that they've been trying to wait out the rioting and hoping for the authorities to do something), and the shop nextdoor gets broken into and set on fire. They have to flee, and the whole "when we leave, we go separate directions" line that Daniel said all of a minute before they actually had to goes right out the window.

They dodge through the crazy crowds, where sometimes people are eating each other and the cops are doing almost nothing despite the riot gear. As always, riots are all chaos and destruction, and in this case, do almost no good and actually a lot of bad, since they're not getting supplies or rescuing people, they're just trashing their own neighborhood and making it easy for the zombies to get dinner.

Hopefully, Travis learned a lesson about the need to park closer. And then when they're almost out from under scaffolding in their way, the cops start hosing down the crowd, which knocks down the scaffold, which knocks down Griselda, and her foot gets crushed. It looked like someone stepped on her on the way down, too, so maybe she'll wind up being like the first lady on Independence Day and get got by the internal bleeding; we'll have to see how that goes.

So everyone gets into the pickup and heads to the hospital where the cops are shooting and shooting and shooting and there's no help to be had. They go back to Travis's house.

Meanwhile, Maddie and the kids have been trying to pretend it's normal--until their neighbor Peter eats their dog. They then break into another neighbor's house to get a gun Nick knows they have, and manage to leave the shells behind when Travis shows up and walks in on the zom; Maddie goes to warn Travis while Alicia goes back to get the shells and discovers that their neighbor Susan is turned and trying to get them.

Travis still wants to help people and it gets him nearly bit, until Daniel the mysteriously hard-edged barber takes Peter out with a shotgun shell to the face--which doesn't stop him, so then he tries again point-blank. Mess everywhere. Daniel wants to stay till morning, when his "cousin" will come get him, and Maddie wants to leave now, and they eventually settle on everyone waiting until morning because the grid is down and they don't know what's out there.

In the morning, they're all ready to go and leave the Salazars there, and then Maddie sees Patrick, the husband of their zombie neighbor Susan, and tries to save him--and he's the most heartbreaking one so far in three episodes of this show. He's so happy to be home, and then he sees his wife all dirty and crazy and looks so crushed, and he goes to hug her and she goes to eat him, and then the soldiers arrive and snipe her before she can get him and all he knows is that she's been shot.

Seriously, it was traumatizing.

So now they think everything's gonna be alright because it's daytime and there's soldiers and hummers and we all know that there's three more episodes and then a second season--and also that this is only the beginning of the End of the World, and their moment of hope is mostly just a mix of "um no" and "oh honey".

This was a much better episode than the others, finally! I still think it took too long to get here, where stuff happens that actually involves making plans and talking to each other and trying to make sense of things, but if the rest of the season is more like this and less like the slow beginning, we'll be okay.

There was also some really nice artistic sections here, which is great, because those scenes where the sound goes down and the movements slow give us a chance to process what we're seeing, and then it has much more impact. In this case, it was going past the hospital, which should be a safe place, and seeing what looked like Nick's old-man room mate lurching through the parking lot and taking rounds from at least six cops who apparently haven't talked to their comrades from last ep who knew to aim for the head. We also got to pause and listen to the radio without pausing the action, and learned that the National Guard has been called in and the area has declared a state of emergency, and that things are bad in more places than just here.

Probably the best character this episode was Daniel. He seems to know something about things like this--I wouldn't be surprised if he turns out to have dealt with an outbreak back wherever he's from, but that's probably unlikely. It feels like he's being set up to be a retired hitman or something, and he doesn't want to get involved with things or to owe people because of whatever made him retire, but that he'll be invaluable to them when he does join up. It also seems that Griselda knows what's going on with him, and was maybe part of it (is that why she's so devout and penitent?), but that their daughter Ofelia doesn't know any of it.

Other things about this episode:

• Nick is once again the only voice of actual reason; he understands that they aren't their neighbors anymore AND that they're actually somehow animated dead people.
• Alicia wins points by going back for the shotgun shells when they need them and without being told, but then sort of loses them by being hysterical about her boyfriend--though, to be fair, literally no one told her what was going on even in a vague sense, and that's really unfair to her.
• Chris seems to have a crush on his step sister to go with the huge chip on his shoulder.
• The collapsed and bloody bouncy castle says so much more than all the screaming they've been doing about what's going on.
• The lights going out transformer by transformer as they drive along the highway on the way home was very well done--little by little, the world just disappears around them. Symbolism!
• Maddie gave most of the drugs she stole for Nick's come-down to Griselda for her smashed leg; how long before a) Nick does something crazy or gets sick again, or b) they have to amputate Griselda's leg to save the rest of her from gangrene-induced zombieness? 
• (the answer to a) is not long, since he almost immediately goes to break into a different neighbor's house, except a little girl sees him and he backs down)
• The zombie ATE THE DOG. How could he? How could they leave him there? Dogs are invaluable resources in the apocalypse! These guys are so bad at apocalypses, and they haven't yet thought to go find Tobias, who isn't entirely crap at them.
• Maddie might wind up being the one to watch out for. She went with a hammer to take care of Susan, and it looked like she actually would have done it if it weren't for Travis being too kind-hearted for the apocalypse and talking her out of it on the off-chance that it might be cured. Which led directly to that heart-wrenching scene with Patrick, so he really should have let her do it.
• There's also a hint of comradery, hopefully, between the ex and the girlfriend when the ex said that they need to stick together for the kids, and Maddie said if she turns, not to let Travis take her out.

All in all, it felt like the characters were settling into themselves and the plot was actually happening instead of just setting up. Which was a relief. This marks the half-way point of this short season, and it would have been criminal to spend the whole six episodes only setting things up, when that was so frustratingly punch-pulling. The pace was much smoother, the visual storytelling was more artistic and creative, and the sense that they were shorthanding things was much much less than it was before. Plus, everyone is starting to feel like more rounded, human people--though it's still concerning how little the main family communicates, especially since the Salazars are communicating just fine, so we know the writers know how to do it. If they make it a point that they don't think things out much and don't ever talk to each other about them, it'll be okay; if it's never a point, it's going to keep being annoying.

What did you guys think about this week's episode? Questions, comments, small cash gifts here, or come talk to me on Twitter!


Previous Episodes:

• Episode One
• Episode Two