What the hell is going on with Fear the Walking Dead? On the one hand, I appreciate the economic fashion in which the story is unfolding: our protagonists have been moved to the requisite new location, the (presumptive) villains have been introduced, we’ve even had a death. On the other hand, it feels as though the show is trying too hard to please the viewer, recycling story beats from other, more successful shows. If Fear can’t be a good show on its own, it makes sense, in a way, for it to attempt to become a facsimile of a good show. But is that really worth watching?
“The New Frontier” has a strong beginning, and unfortunately it’s all downhill from there. Travis, Luciana (who is just moaning Nick’s name over and over, as if we forgot who this show thinks is its best character), and Alicia are in the helicopter with Jake and Charlene, when they come under gunfire. I liked this a lot because it challenges my assumption that Jake and Troy would become season’s villains – what if there’s another group, with superior firepower and evidently peerless aim who wants to take them down? (Almost like the Saviors on The Walking Dead, I guess.)
This is where FTWD takes its boldest step, as Travis gets a shard of glass in his neck. Cliff Curtis gets in a great line reading, as Jake hollers back, “Travis? Travis!” and he responds with a deadpan “Help me.” Well, Travis is beyond help, as it turns out a lot of his guts are spilling out, and Alicia lets him tumble out of the helicopter. This is where “The New Frontier” gets really divisive. We’ve been trained by this current era of prestige television to conflate a character’s death with narrative resonance and power; I’ll admit to being pretty shaken up by Beth’s death on The Walking Dead, until I thought about it for thirty seconds and realized it was dumb.
And that’s the problem with Travis’s death: it’s dumb. Sure, it’s surprising, but that doesn’t automatically make it good. It ties in to what I said earlier, about Fear striving to become an approximation of a good show. It’s almost as if the writers room is filled with aliens who have watched a lot of great TV and are just trying to please us. “Character die suddenly, does that please the hoo-mann?” No, not particularly, Glorzax. “Eye of the Beholder” had such promise for Travis’s character in the wake of Chris’s death, which of course the show doesn’t care to capitalize upon, so it decided instead to kill off one of its only minority characters right when he had a chance to start being interesting. As McNulty said to Stringer Bell, I had such fuckin’ hopes for us.
The aftermath of the helicopter crash is pretty boring. Luciana survived somehow, despite being near death when she boarded it. I hear high-altitude crashes are great for gunshot wounds. Charlene gets bit and Jake has to put her down, which is supposed to be meaningful because they’re childhood friends and Jake’s father is her godfather. But we just met this woman; killing her off so quickly is a waste of an actress like Lindsay Pulsipher, who is pretty good when given the right material. Also, a female helicopter pilot only serves to remind the audience of the best part of Max Brook’s World War Z, and it’s probably a bad move to remind your viewer where they’ve seen this done better.
The Otto ranch (called Brokejaw Ranch, which is awesome) is a nice location, and I enjoyed the introduction of Jeremiah Otto, played by Sons of Anarchy‘s Dayton Callie at his most weathered. Callie projects world-weariness and kindliness in everything he does, and this is no exception; his scenes opposite Maddie are fun because Callie and Kim Dickens have solid chemistry, having worked together for three seasons of Deadwood. Jeremiah goes a long way towards making me question my conviction that the Ottos will be the villains, but certain developments in “The New Frontier” re-enforce my argument. If nothing else, I like that the show isn’t making things perfectly black and white. But we’ve all seen this show, and are familiar with this franchise, so we know that any safe haven always ends in war (the hotel, Terminus, Woodbury, Alexandria, the colonia, and so on). This is a great chance for Fear the Walking Dead to break this cycle of predictability, but it’s content to just play the hits.
Maddie and Nick have the requisite argument about staying versus leaving; Nick tells her, “Trust me, you don’t want me here any longer than necessary,” which is a cringe-inducing line, horribly delivered by Frank Dillane. If you have to tell someone what a badass you are, are you really a badass?
In the end, “The New Frontier” does with Maddie what it conceivably could have done with Travis. “We’re gonna make it our home, even if we have to take it,” she tells Nick. The reason I think this would work better with Travis is because he was in the perfect place for this kind of character transformation. He was shell-shocked by his son’s death, and more than ever he was prioritizing his family above anyone else, starting to believe that not only were other people untrustworthy but not worth saving.
Maddie, however, loves Brokejaw immediately, and maybe that’s part of her seemingly implicit trust of the Otto family. She was drinking the Kool-Aid from the moment she admitted to Jeremiah that she’d swiped one of his guns, and when he let her keep it she was all in. It could have been interesting to have her and Travis on opposite sides of this issue, right as they pledged to be a united front: Maddie wanting to make it their home, Travis wanting the same thing but only if everyone else is gone. Alas, Fear the Walking Dead went the easiest route and is now forcing Maddie to replicate Rick Grimes from the last good season of The Walking Dead, when he was power-mad and bent on taking over Alexandria. I’ve seen that show. Better luck next time, Glorzax.
A Few Thoughts
- I didn’t touch on Strand’s plot because it was boring and made no sense. He’s been pretending to be a doctor, but he has to go because people will be mad if they find out he’s not a real doctor. But in this episode he’s shown extracting a bullet and delivering a baby – doesn’t that kind of make him a doctor?
- Strand got in a good line though: “You should be thanking me for saving you. De nada, asshole.” Colman Domingo is a million times better at Spanish than Frank Dillane.
2.5/5
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