Sorry this is going up a day late; blame the long weekend. With that being said, let’s get to the review.
Fear the Walking Dead is in a serious slump. On paper, the diaspora is a proven method – after all, it worked on The Walking Dead, when everyone was forced to leave the prison. The only difference is, on TWD, we had known these characters for about three seasons, and for the most part we liked them. The same can’t be said about FTWD. “Do Not Disturb” has some interesting elements, but for the most part it’s a slow episode that doesn’t tell us anything we didn’t already know.
Now – and this might sound like backtracking – I actually think it was a smart idea to separate Travis and Chris from the group. Narratively, it makes a lot more sense than Nick’s departure, which exists for plot convenience, because Fear‘s showrunner is convinced that everyone wants to watch a show all about Nick. But here’s the thing: Travis and Chris are arguably this show’s worst characters. Putting them not only together but away from everyone else could have been disastrous. It’s not perfect – there are some very predictable elements to this episode – but it’s good to shake up the status quo every now and then.
Chris is a budding sociopath with no direction in his life, but travelling with Travis has shown him that there is strength in numbers. He has more structure, and it makes him more focused. Travis is still unbearably naïve. He hasn’t had an awakening like Rick Grimes had, a crystalizing moment that tells him how the world is now, something to help him live his life how he needs to. The show isn’t doing right by Cliff Curtis, a fine actor who does his best with subpar material. Some of Travis’s lines only land because of Curtis, such as his insistence that things will someday go back to the way they were. We know he’s wrong, and there’s something very sad about that – this season of Fear takes place opposite season one or two of TWD, and six years later the walkers haven’t gone anywhere. It’s depressingly inevitable.
Things don’t get much better when the two of them hook up with Brandon, Derek, and James, three identical San Diego bros who are actually enjoying the apocalypse (they all look pretty identical; one of them is played by Kenny Wormald, the lead from the Footloose remake, but I’ll be damned if I could tell you which one). Now, since this is part of the Walking Dead franchise, it’s only a matter of time before they’re outed as evil, but the show eschews expectations somewhat by having Chris pull the trigger on a farmer. Granted, we’ve seen Chris kill before, but Travis hasn’t, so this is kind of a big deal for him. I’m all for Travis ditching Chris at the farmhouse, because their entire subplot is just a countdown to when they inevitably rejoin the main group.
Oh, about them: if you wanted to know how Maddie and Strand got out of that walker situation from last episode, well, tough shit, because “Do Not Disturb” spends a lot of time with Alicia. Alicia is such an uninteresting character that the only way to hold the audience’s attention when she’s on screen is to pair her opposite someone dangerous (like Jack) or someone far more interesting (like newcomer Elena).
Elena is the kind of character that this franchise prides itself on but rarely actually depicts. She’s smart and capable, and has a legitimately haunting backstory. “Do Not Disturb” gets off to a pretty good start, to be fair, with a flashback to Elena’s past as the concierge of the hotel in which the group is now trapped. When an outbreak begins at a wedding reception, she makes the tough call and seals the guests in the banquet hall. Director Michael McDonough (who directed the FTWD web series Flight 462) wrings some actual terror out of this sequence – in a show so unapologetically gory, McDonough deserves credit for making a bit-open cheek genuinely unsettling.
About Maddie and Strand – when Alicia and Elena (and Elena’s nephew Hector, a character whose death I am absolutely certain of) meet up with them, they’re…well, they’re fine. God this pisses me off. Remember when Rick was trapped in that RV, surrounded by walkers, and the next time we saw him he was fine? It’s the same shit here. There is no sense of danger, or peril, if characters are going to be put in impossible situations only for the show to hand-wave whatever risk they might have been at. This is just like Glenn and the dumpster, which has inspired me to coin a new phrase, unique to this show. Instead of jumping the shark, this show rolls under the dumpster. Fear the Walking Dead needs to get out from underneath the goddamn dumpster.
A Few Thoughts
- Apparently Schuyler Fisk was in this episode. Did she play the bride? I haven’t seen Fisk in anything since Orange County, so there’s a good chance she looks different 14 years later.
- “Predators find prey.”
- For all this show’s faults, the cinematography is at times very beautiful.
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