TV: Fear the Walking Dead: You had ONE Job!

As I write this, the final episode of Fear the Walking Dead's first season is about 11 hours off.

While the level of anticipation for this spin-off was sky-high before its debut, most of the reactions I've seen over the course of this short season have been disappointed to some degree or another, and I suspect I'm not the only fan who's considerably less excited for this episode than I was for the debut in August.

I've seen a litany of complaints, mostly dealing with the slow pace of the show (which never bothered me) and the characterization (which did).

But my biggest complaint is simple, and much more damaging to the show as a whole: the show has completely failed in its raison d'etre.

Parent show The Walking Dead, like the George Romero movies that inspired it, barely alludes to the early days of the zombie crisis. There are a couple of mentions of a failed government plan to move everyone into the big cities, but the crisis is in full swing by the time Rick Grimes comes out of his coma and it's just taken as given.

So when Fear the Walking Dead was announced, it was exciting not because we would have the opportunity to see a different group of humans fighting zombies in a different geographical location (a.k.a. TWD:LA), but because we were promised a peek at the portion of the story that had remained untold. The big "hook" was supposed to be the opportunity to see how the crisis developed, and how civilization collapsed.

Unfortunately, in the first five episodes, this show has failed in that task completely.
 
Yes, we have, literally, seen a progression of events that occur during the beginning of the zombie epidemic. And yes, civilization appears to have collapsed by the end of Episode Five. But as viewers, we have literally no idea how we got from point A to point B. It's just been a bunch of stuff that (as Jeb Bush might say) happened. The show never gives us the any idea of what the main characters, or the public at large, think is going on, largely because the main characters never discuss it or speculate on it. 

In Episode One, Tobias tells Madison that he's been following the stories of the disease on the internet and she scoffs. Next thing we know, her school is closed, presumably due to the same disease, but we never get any indication of what the official explanation is, or what the characters think is happening.

At the end of that episode, Travis and Madison are confronted by, and kill, their first zombie (Nick's drug dealer) and in Episode Two, Madison kills her school's zombified principal in self-defense. But we never understand what they think is happening. At no point prior to this has anyone stated "There are zombies" or "Dead people are coming back to life" or anything of the sort. Yet, as soon as a zombie acts aggressively, they kill it, even though, for all they know, they're killing a sick or wounded human. And once the characters have seemingly run down one human in cold blood, and smashed in another's head with a fire extinguisher, they never talk about what's just happened. As a result, we don't have a clue what they think or believe as the series progresses.

(Sidebar: yes, the drug dealer was shot and presumed dead, but people survive gunshot wounds and auto accidents all the time. Yes, Madison's principal was attacking her and Tobias, but it's hard to imagine that these characters -- who don't know they're in The Walking Dead universe, who don't even know that zombies exist -- would be so quick to use lethal force without even trying to talk to their "friends". Alternatively, if they do know that these are undead zombies, the show hasn't given us any idea how they figured that out.)

In Episode Three, Madison and Alicia watch their zombified neighbor stalk their other neighbors, without attempting to help. Are they scared? Do they know he's a zombie? Why was Madison willing to attack a zombie to save a student, but unwilling to lift a finger to help her neighbors?

Who knows? They don't say, or give any indication of why they're behaving the way they do. It advances the plot, and that's apparently enough. As in many TV dramas, the writers create "suspense" by the simple device of never having the characters engage in the most blindingly obvious conversations.  Even after Travis and his family break into Daniel's barber shop and request shelter, they don't even bother to sit down and compare notes (that might interfere with the smoldering resentment that the plot requires the two characters feel for each other).

The writers never give us any idea of what's going on inside the characters' heads, and, indeed, don't even seem conscious of the distinction between what the viewers know and what the characters know. We know that a zombie apocalypse has begun, because we've already seen five seasons of The Walking Dead. But the characters haven't! It's a prequel, remember?

At the end of the third episode, the National Guard shows up to turn their neighborhood into an armed compound, but we still don't know if anyone in the main cast realizes what is actually happening. We haven't been given any inkling of the official explanation, any more than we were when Madison's school closed. By Episode Five, the Guardsmen's dialog indicates that they know that the dead are getting up and walking around, but the viewers don't have the slightest idea of how they figured that out, or whether the general public even knows. By the end of Episode Five, it's implied that this subdivision is the last surviving civilian settlement in the LA area, but if that were really the case, I would expect the characters to be freaking out just a little bit.

So, what does this leave us with? The characters in The Walking Dead were always considered among the series' strong points. What does its spin-off give us? A bunch of caricatures.

Travis and Madison are both divorcees, and she and his ex-wife resent each other. His son resents him for spending more time with Madison and her family. Madison blames his ex-wife when the National Guard hauls her junkie son away to the hospital. I guess this is supposed to make the characters more human and easier to relate to, but these cliches are so obvious, trite and shopworn that they're more likely to inspire groans than empathy.

And, speaking of the National Guard, the government and the military in FTWD are shown to act in bad faith in every single case. They lie. They kidnap. They murder civilians in cold blood. They sneer at the people they're supposed to be protecting.

With a lighter touch, and some sense of balance, this sort of thing might work. The Walking Dead (especially the comic series) raises a lot of questions about the intersection of liberty and safety and the nature of governmental authority. With this group of writers, though, Fear the Walking Dead's take on the government seems aimed at those who find Alex Jones and Infowars to be too subtle and nuanced.

In the end, we're left with a mess. Civilization has collapsed, the National Guard has abandoned ship, and it's hard to see how the next season won't just be West Coast Walking Dead. The show has been mindlessly entertaining, with some good moments of suspense, but it seems unlikely to generate any characters that we care about as much as the characters in its parent show (Travis and Daniel are becoming more unlikable with every episode), and completely incapable of delivering a coherent picture of the onset of the zombie apocalypse. Instead of showing us realistic characters reacting to an unbelievably horrifying scenario, we've been given a bunch of half-drawn caricatures running around at the whims of the show's creators to satisfy the demands of the plot.

I'll still be watching tonight, and I'll tune in again next summer to see where they go from here, but it's looking less and less likely that this show will capture lightning in a bottle for a second time.