Walking Dead

[nacho]

The Walking Dead finale was exactly what a show should not do with a cliffhanger. They've been teasing the arrival of Negan all season while at the same time trying to play down the arrival and suggest that they may break from the comics once and for all. They've been teasing death all season -- including faking a character's death Soap Opera style and removing his name from the credits for two episodes. They give us a two hour season finale that meanders wildly, gives the Idiot Ball to every single main character, and finally reveals Negan...for a few minutes. The comics are reenacted exactly and...the big uber kill we've been waiting for is hidden from us. It's from the POV of the victim, who we do not know.

Roll credits, the end, see you in October.

It was cheap, lazy, and stupid.

Now, on the flipside, the season 2 premiere of Fear the Walking Dead was exactly how a show should open up! The fall of society is vividly played out with desperate radio messages and the bombing of Santa Monica. The desperate flight onto the good yacht Abigail is the perfect way to truly begin this series. We are thrust fast and hard into the action, and the slowly creeping reality that everything ended is beautifully handled. "It was all over before I knew it had begun," says one of the characters of the fall of civilization to an anonymous voice on the radio.

These are not the hardened killers of the parent series. These are soft, ordinary people who stare in horror as the Air Force bombards their city.

The use of radio messages is lovely -- a call goes out from a nearby Coast Guard base: "There's no shelter here. No food. No water. There's nothing that we can do to help you... Please...forgive us."

[nacho]

Fear he Walking Dead is so far off base it's almost unwatchable. They're all stuck on a luxury yacht and they're all holding the idiot ball, episode after episode. They make decisions no right-thinking person would again and again. The motivations are unclear for everyone and half the characters are so silent and interchangeable I keep forgetting who they are. They aren't even effective red shirts.

All this is such a sad squandering of what could be a great show. They are observers of the apocalypse, and they're on a clock that's quickly winding down. They should be telling the story of the horror that's playing out through the radio and their occasional stops along the shoreline. Instead they're trying to create distracting drama that doesn't matter.

But... Here I am, looking forward to the next episode. Ugh.

[nacho]

Wow! We actually got a good episode last weekend for Fear. Characters were developed, the crew worked together, the bad guys were interesting, and we got some apocalypse shoreline stuff as well as backstory.

I was shocked!

[nacho]

Fear the Walking Dead;s penultimate episode... Jesus..

Okay, so we've spent all season pushing south because bad boy Strand is a Mexican drug lord's gay lover and the drug lord has an El Mariachi style compound on the coast of Baja. The problem: They have to buy their way through a blockade at the US/Mexican border.

So... The entire west coast of the US has been firebombed, all radio signals have stopped, the world has ended. Presumably, Mexico's not in any better shape. In fact, when our heroes do bust through the blockade they make landfall in Baja and note that the blockade isn't pursuing them because "they're confident whatever is on land will kill us."

But...then... Who is running this blockade? Who's supplying it? Why is it set up at the border if there are no longer any borders to defend? And how is this blockade so impassable to a group of people in a long-range, self-sustaining, ocean-going yacht? Have the mystery blockaders blockaded the entire Pacific Ocean?

Anyway, whatever. They get through and head to the compound where gay boy is dying but everything else is hunky dory. However, what they're actually doing is setting up a retread of season two of TWD -- the compound is the farm. The major domo is keeping zombies locked up in the cellar for the same reasons -- they're our friends and neighbors. Our heroes are faced with the same plight as on TWD.

Fortunately, it looks like they'll wrap this up in the finale instead of, as on TWD, taking the ENTIRE SEASON to make the only obvious and possible choice.

I don't know. At least they're off the boat and they have a compound and a few dozen redshirts.

[nacho]

The Fear the Walking dead mid-season finale was so awful I couldn't even follow the storyline. I even had to fast forward through a couple especially frustrating scenes. This show is very close to personal cancellation...

[nacho]

Fear the Walking Dead is back for the second half of season 2. The premiere was actually okay! Nick has left the group and the whole premiere was his (largely wordless, except for pre-apocalypse flashbacks) weird, moody, half-sick journey through the desert to Tijuana. Lots of zombies, lots of tense moments, lots of abandoned highways and villages. Very fun.

I have (and most reviewers have as well) had a hard time getting to know and learning to like the characters in Fear. The show hasn't really landed on a central character, and the ensemble just seems to fall flat. Splitting them up may change things, and removing the "poor Nick the addict" dynamic from the rest of the cast is a good idea. Now Nick can learn how to man up while the rest of the crew gets on with survival.

Though, of course, it's impossible for them to reunite. When TWD did this in season four, they were all being driven to Terminus, which had plastered most of Georgia, it seems, with signage. Here we have Nick in the middle of Mexico and everyone else back on the boat.

 

[nacho]

You know... Fear the Walking Dead is one strike away from making my personal cancellation list. It'll kill me to put a PA show on that list, but, Jesus. We're almost done with season two and we still don't know/can't identify with/aren't encouraged to care about the characters.

Worse, the characters don't behave consistently or rationally at all. Almost every episode sees every character behaving out of character or carrying the Idiot Ball. It's maddening.

The greatest sin of all, though, is that this is a story about the first days (weeks) or the apocalypse and yet it takes everything learned over the years in the parent show for granted. The zombies, meanwhile, are almost openly treated like extras in a TV show as opposed to a serious menace or threat. It's weird and off-putting and a disservice to the already paper-thin franchise.

[nacho]

Well, thank god. Fear The Walking Dead is over. We actually got some walkers in the finale as well instead of mindless and irrational family drama that wouldn't even make sense or be possible if the world hadn't of ended. Just about every meaningful death happened off screen, told by unreliable narrators. We did get our fair share of family drama. Also fun to see that the US-Mexican border is defended at full strength along it's entire length. Someone might want to remind the writers that there's been an apocalypse and, at the same time as FTWD, the rest of America had completely fallen apart and all contact with anyone in authority had been lost. But, nah. Not in California. Troops enough to defend a 300 mile front line and shoot Mexicans there, even in the middle of a desert wasteland. Easy.

(If you're going to write that in, then you have to explain why they simply haven't taken back, like, all of San Diego or something.)

[nacho]

Thank you, John Cleese. Non-TWD watchers...um...this is all you need to get caught up. Sadly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sU0eizwlejs

[nacho]

The season 7 premiere did two important things.

1) It jumped the shark
2) It rebooted the series back to before the last time it jumped the shark

But the problem is that it wasn't yet another step on our hero's journeys, just more of a corrective. Seven seasons, and about 3 years in-show, and we need an episode where Rick learns to lose his optimism, embrace despair, and harden up? This is the Ricktator! This is the guy who bites peoples throats out. Having Negan become a supervillain and all that term implies makes some sense in the comics but not in this show where he's just another in a long line of supervillains.

"But he has an army." Rick says.

So did Terminus. So did the Governor. So do the walking dead all around them. What Negan has isn't anything new so the whole "sea change pivotal point in the series" is really just about Rick making a mistake and getting caught, but we know he'll dig out of it in the end. Why? Because he always makes mistakes and pays for it. Because he didn't kill the Governor when he had the chance, we lost beloved characters. Because he didn't kill the Terminus folks when he had a chance, we lost beloved characters.

So why is it a big deal that we lose beloved characters now? Because it's a scene from the comic book as opposed to something that's actually surprising, interesting, and independent to this storyline that is independent from the comic book already! 

Getting back in bed with the comic book narrative after they've pretty much spent the last three seasons diverging from it has to be the stupidest thing this show has done. I saw it last night -- it'll kill this show. The first blow was dealt. They've hit the end of the writer's room thread.

[RottingCorpse]

Facebook makes me hate this show... the same way it makes me hate Game of Thrones and the U.S. presidential election.

[nacho]

You know...that premiere was so disappointing that I can't bring myself to watch the second episode. And now we're getting an "extra long" third episode... Of course, episodes 1 and 2 were both 78 minutes. So... What now? Two hours of pandering to the comic books and exploring gore excessive even to a gorehound like me?

I'm debating a personal cancellation here. It took seven years...but, man.

[nacho]

Okay... Episode two,  which is Carol and Morgan in the Kingdom, was fine.

But,  still... This show has studiously avoided the comics for four years and is now aping them almost frame by frame. You really can't have it both ways. This season still feels awkward and ill-conceived.

[nacho]

So that extra long 90 minute episode had 38 minutes of commercials.

Just saying.

[nacho]

So I guess we should just embrace the idea that this show has rebooted into a comedy.