Characters that could have been in Fear the Walking Dead

Caveat 1: I've only been to LA once, when I was very young and didn't really know any of it, but just from watching about it on TV and reading about it in the news, there's all sorts of characters that could have been on this show and weren't.

Caveat 2: Why put a show somewhere and then not use all the options for character and setting that there could be in a huge and diverse city like LA?

I just feel like a teacher and a high school administrator could have come from anywhere and that the options for characters on this show were barely scratched and could have been far more interesting in the set up. We could have had:

• Someone from a poor part of town who wants to make good, who is working his way out of a bad situation--and who has to make the choice when things fall apart about whether he'll fall back on the gang behavior of his old neighborhood, or keep trying to be a more fair person.
• A tour guide who has to keep all those people from far away safe while everything goes to hell around them.
• Actors. Like, any actors.* Someone, maybe, who wanted to be an actor and who was being a waitress, but who had done a lot of research, and come from somewhere else, and knew all sorts of useful things.
• Conspiracy theorists! Tobias was almost one of these, but was barely there.
• Suvivalists who can help or block help.
• Other drug addicts who didn't get rescued by their families, who have to keep surviving on the streets the way they always had, and so will know where the safe places are, the supplies, the danger spots.
• Cops. Any cops at all. Good or bad, they'd be different from Rick or Shane, and their absence is weird.
• People from poor neighborhoods showing up at the gates of the middle-class Safe Zone, trying to get help or information, or just to raid for supplies.
• Rich people with very well-defended homes having to make the decision about whether they'll take in refugees from the city, or if they'll bar their gates--and what happens either way.
• News people still trying to get information out to the masses, who have to jury-rig their broadcasts to make sure they can even be heard when the grid goes down.
• A librarian or museum curator who wants to document this historic event, whether because they're dedicated, or because they're delusional, either would be interesting.
• People on vacation who just want to get home.
• People on business trips who maybe know more about what's going on than they let on.
• Con men! Running cons!
• People barricading themselves in malls or in Costco, and just exactly how that can go wrong.
• Mobsters who have such good control of their territories, that they're practically princes now, since they have peace-keeping methods already in place.
• Surfers and hippies who try to build a floating society out off the coast.
• Motorcycle gangs who can move around quickly, even when there's deadlocked traffic and roads clogged with abandoned cars, and set themselves up as a sort of lifeline for isolated pockets of people on rooftops and in highrises--for good or for bad.
• Fireflighters who keep putting out fires, because if they don't, who will?
• Medical people--doctors and nurses who aren't cold and weird, specialists who are outside their specialty, MEs who have to work on the living because they're the only medical people around, Vets who have to work on people for the same reason, people who lost their licence but who are all that's left.
• Other people from that school who went back there because it's got supplies and is more defensible than their homes, trying to form a democracy of teachers, administrators, families, janitors, and refugees.
• Church people who aren't insane and useless, who have been helping the poor for years, and just start helping more people now.
• Opportunistic criminals.
• Homeless people who can move up into all the abandoned houses, but who are now in neighborhoods that were abandoned for a reason.
• People who were working somewhere on the other side of town from where they live, who just want to get their families back, and spend the whole season going through all these other different parts of town to get back home.
• People who were stuck on a bus in traffic and have to band together even though they're all strangers.
• Public servants who keep working for the public, opening up their homes or offices to people who are trapped or lost or evacuated.
• Hookers or strippers who just want to help.
• Groups of disadvantaged youths who don't trust anyone in control and decide to set up safety for themselves.
• Students from a university who have to study the collapse to keep from going insane, and their professor who holds them together.
• Girlscouts and boyscouts trying to help where there's not cops or soldiers, in a situation that's way above their age-group.
• Criminals from the jail running lose and taking different tactics about what they'll do with this crazy new type of freedom, or trapped in the jail and trying to get out.

Basically, really, we could have had anything that brought people from different areas, social situations, races, or classes together and made them work together or bounce off each other, anything that gave people new opportunities that they had to decide whether they'd take or not and whether they think it's a good idea to, anything that made a good story out of diversity and variety. It could have been complex and complicated before everything went toward the apocalypse, but so far, all of this is hardly touched on, barely even looked at.

We've got a guaranteed next season, and there's plenty of time to shake up the cast and bring in more people from all over the city and all levels of society, but it just would have been nice if this particular one had had more scope and was more open. One family and three people, all from the same other family, they found along the way is not a very good use of the potential such a huge city has to offer. Being inundated by survivors from all over LA and the surrounding areas who were all caught in the wrong place when things went south would fix that nicely.

This is only the beginning of the end. It's been two weeks of disaster, not months and years. People will be trying to regain what they lost, trying to re-contact the outside world, trying to help their neighbors and their families. Where's all the solidarity that can happen in disaster situations? Where's the attempts to band together and make it through, even if those attempts crumble later? Where are the people trying to make sense of what's happening?

NOTES:

*They said on the Talking Dead special that they almost did that, but decided not to--it would be too easy, or something lame like that?

Geeky TV commentary - Fear the Walking Dead season 1 finale

Fear the Walking Dead aired at 9pm on AMC Sunday nights until this week; it'll be replaced by The Walking Dead starting next week.

From a slow start with a dumb name, how far have we gone with Fear the Walking Dead?

This week, everyone finally really gets their shit together and leaves the neighborhood...though they do it in a distressingly sociopathic way that no one really questions all that much, and that's worrying. Daniel opens up that stadium and releases, what, ten thousand dead sports fans? Twenty thousand? It effectively turned the show from Zero Zombies Here to All The Zombies Here, and it got them through the soldier barricade before the soldiers could enact whatever vague clean-up plan they had, but it also will have swamped their homes, and no one fought the idea of not telling the neighbors. That's hateful. They were all "they did nothing" about the soldiers taking people in the night, but not one of the main characters ever shared all of their knowledge and built a feasible idea of what was actually going on. Not with each other, and certainly not with their neighbors, who were literally as scared and confused as they were, and were 100% in the same situation.

It makes it very hard to care about people who don't care about anyone else.

But they get out. And they head to the Facility to save their family members that were taken, so at least there's that. Doctor whats-her-face calls for an evac before the cleanup, but because of the stadium horde, there's delays that get people killed and cause hysteria, and she loses hope and takes out a lot of the patients. Travis and the adults break in the side door and make it to the holding pens, where they free as many of those people as they can...even though three minutes ago, they let all their neighbors die in ignorance. Nick and Strand make their move before that when the soldiers and doctors are distracted, so that they're stuck like idiots in a closed hall full of biters when Team Travis arrives. The same Team Travis that left everything they own in the care of Alicia and Chris who might one day be cool fighters but now have no training and know weapons, so that when some AWOL soldiers show up and harass them and threaten Alicia's virtue, they have to give up one of the cars--with all their stuff and supplies in it. Liza, meanwhile, runs around staring at the destruction, and somehow manages to show up at exactly the same time as everyone else so that they can all be reunited conveniently without having to look for each other, and uses her pass card to get them through the building and back to the cars. Where Soldier Andy pops up out of nowhere, shoots Ofelia, and gets his face beat in my Travis.

Thank god Strand has a plan, because these people are a mess.

They take bizarrely empty roads through a dark and burning LA (and when was the last time there were ever empty roads in LA?), to the beach, where Strand has a huge modern mansion with a generator and is "prepared for this", whatever that means. He's also got a yacht off the beach, and his plan is to get there. Since these guys helped him out and kept him alive, they can come with him.

But nothing is ever that easy. Liza, somehow, when we weren't looking, was bitten on her hip but doesn't have any other injuries and wasn't ever pulled down and eaten, but she knows what that means. She wants Maddie to take care of her, because of their pact to not let Travis do it to either of them--and then they both just throw that out the window by not protesting at all when Travis takes the gun and does it.

So the season ends with, out of that whole group, two women dead, one woman injured and trying not to die of an ordinary infection to rise from an extraordinary one, and and extra man. Which is annoying.

These characters spent a whole season being inconsistent and not sharing what little information they have at all, and then are surprised when people get killed or turn on them. It's one thing to argue that they don't know anything about a zombie apocalypse; it's something else to write off that they're all bad friends, selfish jerks, unanimously bad at asking the right questions or sharing what little info they have, and then asking us to care for them. As said above, it's very hard to care for people who only care about themselves and can't even keep that straight. So far, Strand, after his first episode, is the most interesting, and he makes the others more interesting just by interacting with them. The lesson of that seems to be, if you're going to be self-interested and selfishly murderous, at least commit to it and do it with style. Don't act like there's anything else there.

On the other hand, the city, when we get to see it, is a neat setting; there should be piles of other people around, fighting and surviving, and maybe some of them will be more sympathetic, this close to the collapse, where people should still have humanity and be trying to start over. It's way too early for all this back-stabbing and sociopathy.

The dry hot desert should make for some neat, dried-up zombies, the water might make for some gross drowned ones out there in the kelp, and the idea of having the first "road" season actually be on the water like some weird Waterworld analog could be cool. And maybe getting them out and active instead of penned in by someone else we don't see enough to really know what they're even doing will take care of the passivity of these characters--they can't rely on the soldiers to keep them safe anymore, and if any of those soldiers survived, they're gonna be ticked and know who to blame for what happened. Or any of their neighbors, for that matter.

It was not a terrible first season. It was just a frustratingly inconsistent one, It was being sold to us as a realistic look at the fear and trauma of the world collapsing, but inside of that fear and trauma, they weren't doing all that much to shore up their defenses by, say, teaching their kids what they needed to do to survive? Or even paying all that much attention to where their kids even were? They talked a lot about pacts and sticking together, and then never did anything you'd need to keep those pacts--like, sticking together or keeping their pacts. Are we supposed to really believe that not a single one of them would have wanted to learn how to fight? That they wouldn't have asked each other specifically what they saw and compared notes in any of those nine days of downtime? That none of them would have talked to someone outside the group and figured out what they saw? That no one would have thought about where to get food and water? They did a good job of worrying about medicine, and being resourceful about it, but other than that, not even the ones who were established as once having to start with nothing did much about supplies.

The thing that rankled most, however, was that the people making and pushing the show seemed to equate "these people don't know what's happening" with "the viewer doesn't know what's happening"--which isn't true. We've all watched half a decade of the other show, we've seen much worse than this, and it's frustrating and dull to have the focus on the show so firmly on the level of "none of that has happened yet" when we know it will.

It's a storytelling choice that makes the show as a whole look like it's pulling punches; there's all sorts of ways they could have shown us stuff that the characters don't know--through the soldiers, through barely-received radio or walkie-talkie messages (more than just that one good scene), through people from outside washing up at the gates and asking for help, through any of the characters from other parts of the city that disappeared and were never seen again--and instead, we were given this narrow, closed-off, mostly-threat-free and basically safe sliver while all the interesting stuff happened somewhere else. It was a set up that was not effectively used.

What happened to Tobias and the implied bad life he had? How would those people act as everything fell apart? What happened to any of the students and their families for that matter, or any of the other teachers?

How many of the soldiers were as scared and freaked out as the people, and how many were freakishly happy to run around being gun-toting jerks? All we saw was a uniformity of gun-toting jerk. And how many of them saw what was going on in other parts of the city and had different views about how it was being handled?

Why are all the people we're following basically of the same class, in a city where there's all sorts of classes, races, lifestyles, and a history of falling apart along those lines when things get rough? We saw a riot early on, but all the people involved were very much faceless and none of them had much to do with the story.

Maybe next season will take better advantage of the opportunities this season fumbled. There's a hint of that with the set up of the boat, and Nick saying that he's bascally been living his own apocalypse since he became a drug addict; maybe there will be other rich people trying to do something about the end, and other drug addicts applying their street-learned skills to survive. Maybe there will be poor neighborhoods held together by their shared goals, or mobsters holding things together with the force the cops and soldiers couldn't give them, or branches of the military that aren't just gross caricatures and who are still trying to keep people safe instead of preying on them across the board. Maybe there will be survivalists up in the hills or out in the country who already know how to handle collapses because they've actually prepared for this. It's California. There should be all sorts of interesting and strange and varied people to encounter, now that everyone is all mixed up together!

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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

Geeky TV commentary - Fear the Walking Dead 1.2

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

Second episode! Stuff happens, but there's still not a lot of hook for me; maybe it's the fact that these people don't mean anything yet, maybe it's because the show seems to be acting like we haven't all seen the other series for the last five seasons, maybe it's a pacing issue, but so far? It was less slow-feeling that the pilot, but there's still not a lot of spark to it.

Here's what happened this week: Nick finally goes into withdrawal, which leads his mom to go raid the stash of confiscated drugs at the school to find him something to ease it down, which reunites her with Tobias. He's raiding the kitchens, because he figures he's less likely to cross with scavengers there than at a store or whatever. While they're there, they discover that their principal is a zombie and get really stupid about it because Maddie has already seen zombies and he's clearly a) bloody, b) dragging and lurching and making gutteral noises, and c) not answering their calls with anything but an attempt to bite them. He almost gets Tobias, and she brains him with a fire extinguisher.

This was weird, because it didn't take long, and they didn't show the head-smashing, unlike the other show that revels in that stuff. Which sort of makes it...less impactful?

So she leaves Tobias at home, when really she should be demanding that he stay with her because he's the only one who knows anything about anything so far, and she goes home where she repeatedly doesn't tell her daughter what's going on, so she looks like she's withholding vital information and her daughter keeps flying off the handle because she doesn't realize how much trouble she's in.

Meanwhile, Travis goes to find his son. He's got a bad relationship with his ex, so she doesn't listen to him when he does try to tell her what's going on, but she does go with them when they find out that Chris is at a protest rally that popped up around yet another police shooting. The scene is set up so that you wait for the shot guy to get up, and then reveals that he can't because of a headshot, but it felt...not as shock-ful as it should. Anyway, another zombie (one of the Suicide Girls!) shows up and tires to nom a cop, and she gets head-shot, too.

The cops here: they're stockpiling supplies, they're coming at the zombies with headshots, they know what's going on, but so far they're not saying anything to the people that might maybe make their jobs easier and make them not look like self-serving jerks.

Travis and co see that happen, and they bolt, but the roads are closed already and the other shooting causes a riot, and so they have to take shelter--at a barber shop because that's the first place they see and he's got heavy-duty barriers on his bars and windows. The barber is all "no way", but his wife says to let them in, so now we have three more characters, but we barely get to meet them. They're stuck there, and the phones are getting unreliable and the power is going out all over, so they stay. Travis tells Maddie to head out into the desert and he'll follow when the roads clear.

After she's done with that call, Maddie and Alicia witness the neighbor attack the other neighbor, and still doesn't just tell her daughter what's going on. It's the stupidest thing she could do, and there's not even so much as a "you wouldn't believe me" or "I don't know", so it makes her look like she's got really bad decision-making skills, and it sets up Alicia to do something really dumb and dangerous because she doesn't have any information of her own.

In fact, there's very little talking between the characters at all. A lot of yelling, which still doesn't get much information across, and a lot of not listening, but not a lot of communicating. It makes everyone annoyingly withhold-y, and it steals chances to actually get to know these fifteen people we've been suddenly introduced to. Half of them don't even know each other, and there's no getting-aquainted going on, so it's hard to remember names, hard to relate to them, because they barely have personalities right now, except for a shared talent for not talking to each other when this is exactly the time when everyone needs to be making sure everyone has good information.

It's frustrating. We've seen the other show. We know what's happening. They don't, but they're only reacting so far--the only one who is trying to figure it out is Tobias, and he's not with them, and has only talked to Maddie.

Last episode felt like it had too many minutes to fill; this week feels like it could have done better with those other minutes, giving us the information we need to get to know the characters. This show should stand on it's own, but it's impossible not to compare it to the other, especially to the early episodes. Walking Dead gave us space to meet people, to know them; this show is just throwing everyone at us and not making anyone connect the dots, really. It's just a list of things and people, and no one really cares about what's happening enough.

That isn't to say it's not watchable; it's good enough that the fact that it's skipping a week already is fiercely annoying. But it's also handling things weirdly and sort of superficially, and a lot of stuff is happening but most of it is people just moving from one location to another, without much actual interaction with each other and that ongoing problem of communication. Maybe they were all just super-bad at talking before, but if that's true, someone should have paused and just insisted that all that can wait, we've got an outbreak and police problems to deal with, and we need to talk to each other. There's only six episodes; if someone doesn't make that point soon, they're going to miss her chance.

Also: Alicia went to see her boyfriend who still hadn't answered her texts and found him with a terrible fever in his bed. He looked like he'd been bit, but several problems: they made her leave him at home and she's not, like, fighting it much as she should be if she really loves him as much as she said; they left him alone, and still didn't make much of an attempt to tell Alicia why and what's happening; and he was literally in, like, two tiny scenes where we only saw him with her and got almost no backstory, and have no real idea of how he got bit, so it doesn't really mean much. It's sad, but since he's not a well-known character, what is more noticeable is that there have now been three black guys turned, and it's starting to look concerning.

It's almost like the show is short-handing. Instead of building real characters, they've given us cut-outs--the hard-nosed school person, the rebellious teen (times three), the nice guy, the weirdo, the ex. And then they've just thrown them into situations and let them run around like headless chickens, trusting that "boyfriend is dying" is enough to make it matter, when we don't hardly know who the boyfriend even is because he had all of five lines and then disappeared. It's like an outline of a show.

There's still four episodes left; maybe once they all hit the road, or actively try to meet up somewhere, they'll start having personalities with more than one note, and start interacting in some way other than yelling at each other and not saying the few useful things they actually know in a situation when knowing anything at all is very important. Right now, there's zombies, but there's still mostly people, and the people should be the real threat, but so far it's just a lot of running around, and not a lot of actual...confrontation? Is that the word I'm looking for? There's some zombie attacks, but they're awfully fast for people who have never seen this before and no one has died yet that we know. There's people freaking out, but no one outside of these few characters has really taken notice of them or tried to take anything or stop them from getting anywhere. Everything is falling apart, but it's falling apart with little comment on why, how, and what it means, and no one has brought in a wider context yet.

I hope that gets better. I like the show enough that all these little half-asseries are very annoying--I want it to be better! I want it to have weight and depth! We know what the other show is capable of, and it makes the shallow bits look that much more shallow, or like they're pulling their punches, or not delivering on the threat.

Yet. There's still time to build!

What did you guys think? Did I miss some major growth or interaction because I was complaining on Twitter? Comment here or come talk to me on the tweets!

Geeky TV commentary - Fear the Walking Dead 1.1

Yay! The first premier I'm gonna call part of the Fall 2015 season!

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

This was...somewhat tepid? Like, not bad, but it maybe didn't need to be a whole 90 minutes. On the other hand, it also had a lot to set up, so maybe it's okay? We'll have to see how the next episode or so goes to see whether it's okay or not that this one was so slow.

Nicky the junkie witnesses his sort of girlfriend eating the other junkies at the flophouse they're all staying at, and while he's high and freaking out and running, he gets hit by a car. He tries to tell people what he saw, but no one believes him because he was high, but he's so freaked out, his step dad decides to investigate and finds the place all bloody but the bodies gone, and he's all "they can't have just gotten up and walked away," because the other show doesn't exist yet so he's never seen it. 

After that, he knows that something happened, and when Nicky's roomate codes and he uses that chance to escape the hospital, step dad is the one who believes that something is going on, while his mom only wants to find him and get him home--though she's not sure if she should bother since he obviously doesn't want to be there. Nicky meanwhile, wants to score some more junk, but his dealer is shifty af and tries to kill him, which gets himself killed, and finally Nick calls his parents. When they go looking for Cal, though, they first find nothing--and then, FINALLY, find him in zombie form and know that something is seriously going on.

While all this was happening, there was a viral video of an early attack on the highway that kept Travis and Maddie (the parents) from getting home the night before, and every day there were less kids coming into school where they both work, and her daughter Alicia is planning on leaving town the second she's eighteen. Travis's own son doesn't want to see him and refuses to come to his weekend with him. A kid at school has been putting rumors and weird reports together and knows that something is going down, but everyone just thinks he's a troubled teen. And according to the "this season on", there's lots more characters we haven't even met yet!

There were neat hints all through the show--the missing junkie-bodies, a groundskeeper that looked kind of lurchy, the camera lingering on that old-guy room mate and a hippie van by the beach--that both set the scene and show how wrapped-up and unaware people are right before everything goes pearshaped. Something is going on with Alicia's boyfriend, too. Basically, it seems like this whole hour and a half was set-up and intro, and nothing really much happened until the last half hour. It made it seem slow and not a lot of payoff to watch, and made the emphasis on Nick's junkie-dom seem a little over-focused-on, but at the same time, it could pay off if the rest of the episodes have a lot more action and stuff happening. 

I was unsure about it around the half-way point, but cracked and vulnerable Nick won me over by the end--he's like a less goofy and more messed up Jack Sparrow. And the final reveal of the zombies we always knew were there kicked up the interest and the speed of events, so I'm convinced to come back next week.

There's not a lot to say yet about all these characters; everyone is barely introduced, even at this slow pace, except for Nick and Travis, so they're all just sort of placeholders for their own stories as of now. But we've got several weeks for them to figure out what they're going to do and who they are, so I'm not too worried just yet.

What about you guys? What did you think?

Questions, comments, small cash gifts? Comment below or find me and all my tweets on Twitter!

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