Spoilers through Season 4 of 'Fear The Walking Dead' follow.
It's kind of remarkable to me how a season with such a strong start could devolve into the utter mess that Fear The Walking Dead has become.
That first episode with John Dorie meeting Morgan and then Althea swooping in, and then the surprise twist when the Clarks show up and are basically the "bad guys" was a great, compelling episode. Later in the season, "Laura" turned out to be one of the strongest episodes in either Fear or The Walking Dead. John Dorie and Laura/Naomi's relationship was so well fleshed out. Garret Dillahunt and Jenna Elfman were fantastic.
Then, bit by bit, the season began to crumble. In a series of episodes split across multiple timelines, not only did the tension drain, things just got stupid. Not only did character motivations begin to no longer make sense, the actual plot stopped making any sense. Before we get to the Big Death, let's talk about how nonsensical the midseason finale (and, in retrospect, the entire half-season) ended up being.
Why was Alicia mad at Naomi?
Well, okay, not Naomi. Not Laura. Her real name (maybe?) is June. Maybe the best part of the episode was when John Dorie said June was his favorite month. It's my favorite month, too.
We discover why Alicia was so mad at June in the midseason finale. Well, sort of. She tried to shoot and kill her a few episodes back, nearly killing John in the process. She's still so mad at her by the midseason finale that she almost does the deed, only relenting when Morgan talks her down. And the reason?
June, along with everyone else at the Diamond, ran away when the Vultures dumped the zombies. It was silly to run---I'd much rather be in a fortified stadium than in a car---but it's hardly the kind of betrayal that requires rage and vengeance.
Alicia at one point says that her mom died because of June's actions. This makes no sense. It makes no sense from the audience's perspective and it makes no sense from Alicia's perspective. Madison died because Alicia and Nick didn't just...drive their perfectly functional car across the parking lot to safety, forcing Madison and the rest to come save them from their...stupid decision not to drive a half block.
I get why Nick was so mad at that one Vulture guy. He's the guy who dumped the zombies. But why was Alicia so mad at June? And why was she so mad at Mel, who didn't want his brother to dump the zombies to begin with and who merely escaped with Charlie?
None of this makes sense, and this lack of anything at all remotely resembling a logical plot makes the big death at the end even worse.
So long, Madison.
Madison, who has become the group's leader and a tough-as-nails badass over the course of three-and-a-half seasons, died last night for no reason at all. She died just because. She died in one of the silliest, most contrived scenarios I've ever seen. Her death was even more ludicrous than Carl's over on The Walking Dead.
I say this as someone who has never been a Madison fan to begin with. I still believe she deserved a better death. A death that actually, I dunno, made one lick of sense. A good death on a show like this is one of two things: A senseless death that comes out of the blue---wrong place, wrong time, zombie bite---or a death that comes because of a choice or series of choices that make that death inevitable.
I'm not happy that they killed off Nick, but at least his death was the consequence of an action. He killed out of revenge and then was killed for the very same reason. What goes around comes around. Karma.
Then there are the utterly senseless deaths. Think of how they offed Travis in Season 3. He killed all those zombies in the pit. They were free and clear. Then bang he's taken out from a shooter on the ground. He tosses himself out of the damaged chopper to save Alicia. Or think of how Noah died in Season 5 of The Walking Dead. That never needed to happen, but man it was a powerful death simply because it was so senseless and terrible.
So why does Madison die? Because the Vultures decided to unload a thousand zombies to "take" the Diamond. How were they planning on actually going in there to scavenge stuff if they loosed a horde of that size? She died because nobody thought to shoot at the Vultures before they let the zombies out. She died because Nick and Alicia just sat there and didn't drive away or drive to the gates. She died because the zombies were attracted to her flare but not to the huge flames out in the parking lot.
She died because the new showrunners wanted to kill off her character because hey, what's a few seasons of character development? Isn't a big, shocking death worth it?
I didn't like Madison very much as a character. Her death was still total BS. And the midseason finale was a trainwreck of epic proportions. I'm not sure how a season can start off so good and just crash and burn so completely.
The timeline split ruined the season.
I think a big reason why this all ended up being so bad was the two timelines. Well, actually more than that. We saw Althea interviewing Madison when she was apparently split up from her kids before they even found the Diamond. I'm not sure what the point of that scene was. It does nothing to change Alicia's mind about killing June. It does nothing to further the plot. It just adds more backstory that, ultimately, means nothing at all.
When we already know so many outcomes, we're robbed of both tension and emotional weight. But when the timelines don't ever end up coming together in a satisfying conclusion, it's even worse. The big problem here is that we don't really ever see how Alicia and Nick and that crew go from sitting ducks in their car to badass road warriors with a hidden cache of heavy weaponry.
Then, the moment they team up with Althea and Morgan and John (well, sort of team up) everything goes to hell. Within hours, Nick is dead. The Vultures are almost all annihilated, John Dorie is grievously wounded, but it's all spread out across so many episodes and time jumps that it's more confusing than exciting.
I also hated how Alicia, Nick, Strand and Luciana would recount the "before" timelines to Althea. This happened across multiple episodes and it was just such trite storytelling. The showrunners took a cool character with a cool mission and turned it into a gimmicky narrative device. And I'm sorry, having Alicia and Strand and Luciana all finishing one another's sentences in this last episode was just hokey as hell. Just pure, unabashed cheese dressed up in pretentious clothing. American cheese trying really hard to be Mimolette.
What began as a very solid season with great dialogue, interesting cinematography and great new characters ended up crashing and burning as badly as the Diamond itself. I want to believe that the second half of the season, hopefully freed from the timeline shenanigans, can be better, but this has crushed my faith in the new producers' ability to steer the ship. The show has foundered. It has splintered against the crags. Little pieces of it are washing up on the shore. The survivors are praying to Neptune to save them.
The gods aren't listening.
Good new characters have been almost entirely wasted. Morgan's crossover went from interesting to redundant. Established old characters have been killed off or turned into boring one-dimensional caricatures. Something very badly needs to change. I feel like I'm writing my review to the Season 2 season finale right now. Amazingly, something did change then. Season 3 was great for the most part. Season 4 started out great. Can it be great again? Can AMC Make FTWD Great Again?
Verdict
I'm actually really bummed out right now. I had such high hopes. And I have no real answer to the above question.
I still really like the new characters and I think the show can survive the loss of Nick and Madison, though it won't be the same. I'm not sure it can survive the bad storytelling and the gimmicky, contrived plot. If I have any advice at all it's to drop this artsy stuff and just tell us a good story. Give us these interesting characters and let's see how they tackle the apocalypse. And we don't always need a new group of villains.
Sometimes, we can just have zombies. Or sickness. Or bad weather. Or greed and avarice and jealousy. So many ways to create compelling drama beyond Negan-lite wanting to come take peoples' jobs or whatever. The episode 'Laura' is a great example of how to create really interesting drama without a Big Bad Villain.
Whatever direction this show goes in the back-half of the season, I just want it to make sense. I want the dots to connect in a way that makes us say "Oh wow, I didn't see that coming" but in a good way. Like, we should have seen that coming but didn't because we didn't expect Character A to betray Character B or we didn't expect the selfish character to do that selfless thing. You get the picture.
Scattered thoughts:
- Madison corralled all those zombies with ease, bringing them all into (instead of out of?) the stadium. Why, then, was it so hard for her to find an escape route? Made no sense.
- Why was Madison in Oklahoma on the way from Mexico/Arizona/So Cal? That's not on the way to Texas. That's North of Texas.
- Why did they get rid of Proctor John, who was also headed to Texas? Why didn't we get any kind of flashback to the days previous to the diamond? Where did Luciana come from? Where is Daniel Salazar? What the heck people?
- What was the point of the noodles? What purpose did that serve?
- How did they get past all those zombies---like, when Alicia shows up to kill June, how did she get past the zombies?
Okay I need to just stop and rest my brain.
I just want a good story.
Is that really so much to ask?
