Man, what a missed opportunity. Fear the Walking Dead had the chance to deliver the best episode of its second season, and it squandered that opportunity in every conceivable way. This should have been a gut-wrenching, white-knuckler of a bottle episode, digging deep into the fraying relationship between Travis and Chris, one of the worst characters in TV history (has a character ever been so instantly, and justifiably, as reviled as Chris? Moreover, while certainly not perfect, has The Walking Dead ever had a character as universally loathed? Morgan comes close, but at least he’s responsible for shining moments in episodes like “Days Gone By” and “Clear”). “Date of Death” should have absolutely slayed us, and made us realize just how profoundly lost and damaged Chris is. Instead it just made us hate him more.
And let’s talk, for a moment, about how badly this show is misusing Cliff Curtis. Curtis is a fine actor, and all the good parts of “Date of Death” are solely because of him, such as the quietly lovely scene of him burying Elias Suarez, the farmer who Chris murdered, and realizing that he doesn’t even know the man’s name. Later, Travis becomes increasingly protective of James, who was shot in the leg, because the increasingly cartoonish Brandon and Derek want to put him out of his misery. While Brandon and Derek were at first marginally interesting, in “Date of Death” they lose all semblance of reasonability and humanity: they want to kill James, who will recover, because he’ll slow them down on their way to San Diego, which they’ve been told multiple times has been razed to the ground.
It should come as no surprise that their shortsightedness infects Chris almost right away. One hundred percent of Chris’s actions in “Date of Death” are because he badly wants to impress some older boys who can, I don’t know, buy him beer or something (the episode makes this crystal clear by showing Chris actually sharing a beer with them). At his most despicable, Chris tricks Travis into hugging him, just so he can restrain Travis and allow Brandon and Derek to rush the barn, point a gun at Travis’s head, and kill James. It would be one thing if this was the culmination of several episodes’ worth of character development and devolution, but Chris has always been terrible, so it’s not only unsurprising, it carries zero emotional impact.
In the end, Chris leaves; as the truck pulls away, Travis is shouting “Goddamn you, Chris!” in a naked attempt by Fear to emotionally crush its viewers. It fails. Chris is the Jar Jar Binks of Fear the Walking Dead; he’ll go down in history as one of TV’s worst characters, a dubious honor shared by the likes of Jean Paul in The West Wing and Pip in South Park. No one will miss him, so when he leaves, the feeling evoked isn’t devastation, it’s glee, and part of me wanted to give “Date of Death” a snarky grade of five stars because it means the last we’ll see of Chris for a good long time. But I guess I feel some obligation to review this honestly, and honestly: this episode is a fucking turkey.
Curtis’s fine performance might have saved the day – or increased the episode’s score – were it not for the dopey framing device employed here. In the cold open (which has good music behind it, as does most of this show), we see Maddie and the rest of the survivors turning away refuges from the hotel. One of them turns out to be Travis, who relays this story to his wife. This could have been saved until next week, because preserving the unity of setting would have made “Date of Death” far more intimate and claustrophobic.
It doesn’t help matters that Maddie is behaving with absolutely no rhyme or reason. She takes Alicia out on to the pier to tell her the truth about her father’s death: it was suicide, not an accident. This should be a groundbreaking revelation, but I have one problem with it:
Who gives a shit?
The first time we ever heard of Alicia and Nick’s father was in this season’s “Grotesque.” That was also the last time we heard of him. Gun to my head, I couldn’t tell you his name. So I don’t buy Alicia’s crocodile tears, because this man did nothing to inform the character of her or Nick (even when absent in an episode, Fear can’t help heaping praise on Nick; here we learn that his smile can “light up a room,” according to Maddie). My point is: while this man might be important to Alicia, Nick, and Maddie, Fear the Walking Dead has done absolutely nothing to make him important to viewers, and by adding this on at the end, it only shows how little the show had to actually say about Travis and Chris, who, again, should have taken up the entirety of the episode.
Moreover, Maddie tells Alicia that she never loved her less than Nick, which is absolute bullshit. No one on Fear loves anyone as much as everyone loves Nick.
“Date of Death” had the potential – really, it did – to be Fear the Walking Dead‘s finest hour. In some universe, that’s exactly what it was. But in this universe, the show did what it does best: give us unlikable characters for an hour, and go on and on about how fucking great Nick is.
1.5/5
‘Terrible’
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