Fear the Walking Dead 209 "Los Muertos"

Okay Walking Dead, you have our attention. Now - what are you gonna do about it?

The levels of fandom, geekiness and even general attention the franchise gets is now legendary (after 6 seasons of TWD and being over halfway through 2 additional seasons of FTWD). It hasn’t particularly slowed, though it occasionaly shows signs of the potential for that.

Part of the dilemma this creates is how do you tell an artful story to a broad audience? If your strokes are too broad, you lose a core constituency of critics and geeks that exist to be enthralled with the minutia of genuinely good storytelling. If your strokes are too narrow, you lose the more casual watercooler audience that just want to be entertained without having to be taxed too much. And before I am accused of some form of elitism, I think that’s a perfectly valid state. Many is the time I’ve chosen to go with an episode of some Fox animated show rather than challenge myself with anything too deep or geeky. In fact, I would say more often than not, while I truly treasure those works that transcend the saturated corporate storytelling molds, I still gravitate toward armchair entertainment.

In no other show currently on television do I feel this struggle more acutely than FTWD. With it’s strange gait, waddling between philosophical constructs, quite moments, maintaining its claim to the action genre, making sure there’s enough zombies in each episode, and attempting to grow organic characters in a scripted greenhouse, it often feels uneven to say the least.

My personal joy in watching this show isn’t so much that it’s succeeding in so much as it is genuinely trying. And even when I feel like the overall story is undercooked, uneven, or some characters aren’t quite managing to push forward, I can sense that everyone involved is really trying.

And sometimes succeeding. Sometimes failing. But really trying.

There is a constant war between overly obvious visual and script cues and obvious setups, and heartfelt, organic storytelling.

The biggest problem the show has from my perspective at the moment is that it doesn’t quite have its act together in terms of the longterm story. It’s predecessor, TWD, had the huge benefit of tons and tons of source material. And a creator/producer willing to use it, not use it, add new things, change things around, etc. But it had that roadmap.

FTWD did not. At least not in the same immediate sense. It had a genre, and a world layed out that it was part of. But not that sort of “storyboard” in its purest form that was TWD comics.

In spite of that, I felt the first season painted a good solid portrait, with some solid characters, interesting relationships, and a good entry point (the beginning of the outbreak).

With the start of the second season, things began to lurch and halt and meander and slam into things as it tried to find its legs, which, mystifyingly, it had already found I felt in its first season.

The boat was intriguing, but that sort of didn’t last long. The stories linger in strange places and lurch ahead in others, sometimes inexplicably, leaving I think both of those core audiences in the dust. And part of it does perhaps feel like an attempt to please everyone, ultimately threatening to please no one.

It’s a show that feels always like it’s right on the verge of either descending into commercial pablum, or ascending into true greatness. But always on the launching pad, without ever quite launching.

One of the things I find most interesting and entertaining about this show is how creative it gets with the concept. It puts me in mind of the old days when Romero and company would sit around coming up with genuinely cool and original zombie gags that still served the overall piece, and pace. This show, probably much moreso than TWD, is genuinely creative in its smaller moments and larger concepts.

I think in fact, in many ways FTWD actually advances TWD universe beyond a standard zombie genre survival horror work in similar ways that Romero did by introducing overarching things and social commentary.

In this episode, we delve into one community’s answer to the new world, which includes its own philosophy, about how to live with this new situation. I like that it speaks to sacrificial concepts. So much of the TWD universe seems to be about what is MINE and keeping what is MINE and being strong enough, having enough guns or baseball bats, etc, to keep MAH STUFF etc. Especially in the internet age, I think a lot of people identify with that side of things. Maybe even over-identify, which on some levels is troubling.

What FTWD seemed sort of intent on doing, right out of the gate, was to hang on to those values of self-sacrifice, and explore notions of confronting something intellectually and spiritually as well as physically in a way that, in 6 seasons, TWD hasn’t quite ever seemed to truly lock horns with in a meaningful way. Or certainly not in the same way they have presented the “survivalist” side of things.

In that way, I actually find, while FTWD is much lighter on action, I get more out of watching it than I get out of watching TWD. Though TWD is wildly entertaining, don’t get me wrong.

I feel though, that they sometimes lag in the action scenes, both broadly and in the details. The Madison/Strand bar attack could and should have been much more visually interesting than it turned out to be. Both from a visual/blocking perspective and a storytelling perspective. What was arguably the central action sequence of the episode came off fairly pedestrian from every angle. The setup wasn’t quite as poignant or emotional as it could have been. The blocking didn’t really give one a sense of the scale of the sequence or where characters were, what their options might be, or even provide any particularly creative gags. Just - literally pick up something and hit a walker with it and - just - kind of felt phoned in in every sense as scenes go.

But then we have a very interesting budding relationship between two characters in Nick and Luciana, two of the better developed characters on the show crossing paths. Luciana with her fantastic combination of suspicion, pain, and strength that she seems to carry everywhere she goes. And Nick’s free spiritedness and openness, somewhat shackled by the baggage and chains he carries over from the old world. They make a very nice fit in terms of general dynamic that I think serves any scene they’re in together.

Conversely, the stuff with Alicia and Ofelia felt forced in every respect. The dialogue felt forced and rushed, there doesn’t appear to be any kind of chemistry at all. Their scenes felt fairly disposable. The whole hotel aside feels almost like “giving those characters something to do” rather than telling a story. Kind of “well we’ll just put them here while we try to figure out what we’re doing here” or - something along those lines. It doesn’t feel organic or technically progressive. It just feels like kind of filling space with something while they move other parts of the story that play as more generally meaningful to the overall character and plot arcs.

There are ideas and bits of things that are clumsily introduced in the dialogue, but I just feel like none of those scenes came together ever. From the discovery of the hotel on through the climax bar fight. It all felt - even the things I like, I feel like it was me being kind or grudgingly like “well at least they got that out there”, when I would much rather, as a viewer, have not had to focus on the story in that way. I would have much preferred that whole set of scenes to have been smoother, fit together better, and been better conceived and executed. Even the coolest thing, which was the zombies falling off the balconies, wasn’t nearly the payoff it could have been.

The intercutting at the end is a fantastic example of how I feel about this show. I sort of seemed like a decision that was there for no reason. It didn’t really do anything for either sequence. It actually felt like it detracted from both. Perhaps it was done to convey drama and action toward the climax of the episode. Or maybe the action sequence was so weak they felt it couldn’t stand on its own without the intercutting. But I feel like they could have ended on either of those sequences. Alejandro’s speech was dramatic enough to probably end on. The action sequence was weak, but if they’d cut that just a tiny bit differently, or even prepared and executed the sequence better, it could have been a great ending as well.

I think the two intercut led to an unnecessary sense of bewilderment on the part of some viewers, and dulled any effect the ending might have had if it had gone with one or the other of those things.

I do like this show a lot. I root for this show. In some ways, I do enjoy it more than TWD. In other ways TWD seems far superior. I feel like the show needs to take a breath and anchor itself more to its characters, and set up some longterm goals for itself. As it is, it often feels too often like its floundering between a lot of shortterm goals and perceptions as well as sometimes bogging itself down in corporate storytelling. I think they’re not quite fully into that bog just yet. Maybe just got one foot stuck in it. Hopefully we’ll see it get better as it progresses and learn from its mistakes.