‘Fear the Walking Dead’ Stumbles Into the Sunset (TV Review)

[rating=5.00] “The Good Man”

Well, that was… certainly a TV show. The final installment of the first season of a TV show, in fact. All the right pieces were moving, and it was tense (at least the music told you it was), as all the characters abruptly decide to flee their safe zone, retrieve the other characters and head east. Don’t forget, that’s been the big plan here this whole time. East.

So, after the miscellaneous members of the various families and step-families gather their things, their hostage soldier along for the ride, plan to head toward the compound to retrieve the other two characters left behind there. Despite the all the heavily armed military guards, they have one plan to resort to – the stadium full of the undead, conveniently located right next door.

I mean, sure, it distracts the guards, but there are now thousands upon thousands of roaming, flesh-eating zombies roaming the streets of Los Angeles. This simply did not seem like the most well thought out plan at all.

Of course, they all happen to run into one another despite the chaos of a fucking stadium’s worth of zombies attacking a military compound, including Gilbert Grape and his new friend, Strand, who is my favorite character simply for being the most well-dressed man who’s also prepared for the apocalypse. Is he evil? We don’t know. His cadence suggests he’s evil, certainly. And he leaves the soldier he’d been bribing to die, telling him “you’re well on your way,” which lends itself to the argument that he is, in fact, and evil, boat-owning, well-dressed man.

He also advises that they go west, not east. This, of course, changes everything.

They reunite with the final two characters, Nick and Alicia, left behind in the parking garage so they could get accosted by soldiers who take their SUV (seriously, why was this in the episode?), only their former hostage is now more than a little upset, so he goes and shoots Ofelia in the arm, and is pummelled severely by Travis, who spent most of the five episodes prior alternating between not believing anybody and not being able to do anything about it, usually with his mouth agape and brow furrowed. Well, apparently all bets are off when someone gets shot in the arm amidst the entire world ending around them.

They also head west, they get to Strand’s house, which does resemble the lair of a supervillain, complete with its own power grid. So, he may be evil. He also has a boat, which doesn’t necessarily make him less or more evil, but he does have one. It’s nowhere near the house, though, and you need binoculars to see it, but it’s there.

Oh, also, Lisa got bit at one point, but didn’t notice (seriously, how do you not notice THAT?) So the show closes out its first season by beating the same undead horse with a bloated, drawn out sequence of one character having to shoot another they cared about for seven agonizing minutes.