Fear the Walking Dead is such an unimportant show to me that I had literally forgotten it was returning. It took a random Twitter post to remind me, and my first reaction was to say “Aw, shit” out loud in Target. So, needless to say, I was not looking forward to its return (okay, a part of me was, because negative reviews are more fun to write and to read than positives ones). I knew what to expect: more hero-worship of Nick Clark, boring characters (after two seasons, I couldn’t tell you a characteristic of Alicia beyond “Has long hair”), and forgettable, ill-defined antagonists. “Eye of the Beholder” didn’t completely break this mold, but it was a refreshingly solid premiere. But I’m pretty sure I said the same thing about last season’s “Grotesque,” so maybe you should just not listen to me.
I maintain that this show is at its best when it changes scenery; the best episode of season one, “Cobalt,” knew that, and introduced a military interment center where Nick met Strand. “Beholder” follows that template, and introduces…a military internment center. Whereas in “Cobalt” it was a ramshackle quarantine zone, hastily thrown together, here it’s a fortified, well-maintained complex, and I found myself impressed by the incongruity of such a facility surrounded by a barrier of corpses (it’s explained that the dead won’t eat the dead, which, yeah, I guess is true).
Travis gets far rougher treatment than do Maddie and Alicia, who are put up in a nice, if spartan, office belonging to Troy Otto (Dan Sharman), the apparent leader of the outfit. Troy is a little polarizing; on the one hand, I like that he’s younger than you’d expect a military leader to be, and Sharman uses his good looks to a disarming effect. On the other hand, we’ve all seen 28 Days Later, and the takeaway from that movie is that if you think the military is going to help you during a zombie apocalypse, you are very wrong. So it comes as no great shock when Troy turns out to be a bad guy; the whole episode flirts with the idea that the audience already knows this, but unfortunately that leads to some pretty stupid character moments. When Troy leaves the room, Alicia tells Maddie, “He’s going to kill us.” Maddie responds, like a dope: “He seems to like us.” At her best, Maddie is FTWD‘s best character, so moments like this really make the audience resent the writer (in this case, showrunner Dave Erickson) for dumbing her down for plot purposes.
Travis is having a rougher go of it, locked in a storage room with several other refugees-cum-prisoners. Despite Troy’s assertion that the only Americans on the base are his militia (I’m going to go with that work as opposed to military, because I don’t know yet if they’re actual military), the first person Travis meets is an American named Steven. Nick is there too, covered in blood as per usual. There’s an organic reason for it this time, but I feel safe in my assertion that Nick will be covered in blood, shirtless, or both in every single episode of this season. Prove me wrong, show.
The militia don’t make for interesting villains because it seems as though zero thought went into them. The most interesting one, played by Noel Fisher of Shameless, doesn’t even have a name. I checked IMDb and everything. Sight unseen, did you assume the militia be cartoonish frat boy types? No points if you did, because of course that’s what they were going to be. The nature of their evil is arbitrary and poorly realized; they restrain Travis and some other prisoners in the bathroom, killing them one by one and seeing how quickly they turn once they’re dead. Sure, something about your life ending randomly and for no reason is scary on an existential level, but the show doesn’t do a good enough job defining that.
There’s a decent scene where Travis antagonizes the guards to distract them from the fact that their most recent victims are turning, after which he, Nick, Luciana, and Steven make their escape. This is where the episode really picks up steam, due in large part to the direction of Andrew Bernstein, who’s done fine work on Mad Men and The Americans, and handles himself nicely here. Erickson’s script works better here too, as the escape believably evolves, moving through peaks and valleys that find Nick and Luciana staring down a crowd of walkers, or Travis dumped into a pit and forced to fight for his life (which admittedly would have been cooler if we hadn’t seen a version of it in The Walking Dead‘s Woodbury).
The reason all this works is because everyone, not just Nick, is given something to do. Cliff Curtis is brutal and animalistic in the way he dispatches walkers, and I maintain that Chris’s death was the best thing for the show, because Chris sucked to begin with, and now Curtis gets to play Travis as more wounded and haunted, quicker to violence and less prone to caring about other people. Maddie almost takes Troy’s eye out with a spoon (shades of, once again, TWD‘s Governor), but is talked down by Troy’s brother Jake (Sam Underwood). Jake seems decent, but only a fool would trust him and his alt-right haircut; expect Fear to think it’s really shocked you when he turns out to be evil in a few episodes.
My favorite shot, though, is of Nick struggling with an undead Steven. Luciana is too weak to help him much, and Alicia manages to drop her butterfly knife through a grate. Luciana catches it and kills Steven. This is the first sign that this season of Fear the Walking Dead might do better by its women, and that maybe it’s realized there are characters besides Nick through whom to tell a story.
A Few Thoughts
- I will say I unashamedly enjoyed the ending. The group is separated, and Maddie and Nick are in a truck with Troy. This offers the show a chance for some real character development, which I sincerely hope it capitalizes upon.
- That said, no idea how Travis is going to explain himself to Maddie. “I don’t see the problem, I just left you and your son to fend for yourselves while I helped a relative stranger to safety.”
- I’m disappointed by Fisher’s death. Not that we need another broadly-drawn sociopath in this franchise, and the imagery of his death was certainly cool, but it was clearly done to give the viewer closure and catharsis, and it afforded neither. I don’t like fan service when it’s done in such a straightforward fashion, and moreover if Troy (or, more likely, Jake) is going to be this season’s villain, it would help if he had a #2 like that.
3.5/5
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