Spoilers through Season 5 of 'Fear The Walking Dead' follow.
I'm having a really hard time mustering up any sort of enthusiasm for Fear The Walking Dead, and the opening episode of Season 5 isn't helping.
It's not that last night's episode was terrible. It even had a few good moments, and an interesting twist with the mysterious armored zombies and the documents Al found, all pointing to the same group that whisked away Rick Grimes in The Walking Dead's most recent season.
Likewise, when Strand (Colman Domingo) discovers that the guy Al (Maggie Grace) knows who has a plane is Daniel (Ruben Blades) and looks so distressed, I had a good chuckle. Strand and Salazar are not on the best of terms.
I even liked the ragtag group of kids that the survivors run into, as well as the new sort-of-bad-guy Logan played by Honey I Shrunk The Kids alum Matt Frewer. I don't think I've seen Frewer in anything since that 1989 film, but I recognized him instantly. I say "sort-of-bad-guy" because the dude has a point. Just because Morgan and his group moved into the Mill doesn't make it theirs necessarily. If he owned it before the apocalypse, I see no reason why he shouldn't own it now. He got them out of there without firing a shot, also, which is pretty nice for a villain, especially compared to basically every other villain in either Walking Dead show.
But other than that, and some cool Alicia (Alycia Debnam-Carey) zombie killing moments, the episode just fell enormously flat for me. I think part of it is the premise now that the show has adopted Morgan (Lennie James) and his do-gooder philosophy. I guess now our heroes are literally heroes, out trying to help people no matter the risk.
I mean, they somehow managed to get a plane which none of them knew how to fly, and then flew somewhere in order to help Logan (who was tricking them) with no real gameplan. I'm not sure how they were going to fit everyone in such a small plane after this theoretical rescue, but considering that they didn't even know how to land the thing and could have all died in the process, this just strikes me as enormously stupid.
Almost as stupid as not drinking the damn ethanol when the tanker got shot up last season. My goodness, it's like watching a show about the stupidest people alive somehow managing to survive a zombie apocalypse. It's painful to behold. It would be funny if that was the actual premise (seriously, I'd watch the Idiocracy version of The Walking Dead) but alas, these are supposed to be tough, smart survivors. Not the imbeciles they've been written as.
In any case, they crash land and Luciana (Danay Garcia) is impaled in the crash. Nobody else is severely injured. This would have been a good time to kill of Luciana who hasn't been an interesting or useful character since she became Nick's girlfriend shortly after being introduced as a badass leader, but no. Rather than mercy kill her, the character assassination will continue apace.
Also, while I'm happy to see Daniel return (he's by far the most interesting character other than Alicia at this point) I'm not sure why Blades would want to return to this sinking ship. Maybe (hopefully) the season improves after this episode, but I'm not getting my hopes up. The fact that Al has also interviewed him is just too convenient, too much of a coincidence, on top of her having also interviewed Madison before meeting up with Morgan and John Dorie (Garret Dillahunt). Al just knows everybody, I guess. And everybody just magically shows up in the same vicinity as one another for some reason.
Speaking of John Dorie, I really do like his character but they're just not using him for anything interesting at this point. I'm also having a hard time buying his and June's relationship. June (Jenna Elfman) is another character I just have no feelings for whatsoever. Why did they make her a nurse when she's basically a doctor? Nurses don't operate on people. They don't perform major life-saving operations like this at trauma centers or anywhere else. I could believe that she'd make an attempt in a pinch like this, but the whole notion that she's some seasoned surgeon at this point is just silly. Just make her a doctor in the first place if this is how you're going to use her character.
I don't know exactly what it is that rubs me so wrong about June, but I guess maybe it's both Elfman's performance to some degree, as well as her character arc and how she's been written. The whole "nobody can help me" character always running away suddenly transforming into another of Morgan's Avengers just didn't land for me. And I'm not really feeling much chemistry between her and Dorie, though that may be a symptom of the writing.
Stupid Is As Stupid Does
In any case, Al is knocked out and captured by one of the mysteriously armored people because I guess she thought it was a good idea to go back to the crash site in the dark and rain by herself to investigate for some reason. Like everyone else on this show, and for reasons known only to the writers and producers, Al is a total idiot.
Meanwhile, Logan pulls a fast one on Morgan by tricking them into going to a distant truck stop (we still don't know where, but I guess it was far enough that they had to fly in a plane they found somewhere but didn't know how to actually pilot, oh my god who writes this stuff???) and then peacefully taking back what was his to begin with. He even dumped a bunch of their stuff outside the fence in the process.
In yet another scene of abject stupidity, when Strand and his new trucker pals, Sarah (Mo Collins) and Wendell (Daryl Mitchell) show up and see other people have occupied their base, they all get out of the truck and point guns at them, just standing there right out in the open, outnumbered, making themselves the easiest targets imaginable. If Logan had been a more ruthless foe, he would have had them all shot right then and there and wouldn't have faced a single loss.
Who does this? Nobody, that's who. Nobody would just walk out there like that, knowing they could be easily shot and killed, with no semblance of strategy and apparently no lines of dialogue either. Also, they'd need to actually help Wendell get out of the truck and into his wheelchair, so now I'm just picturing how ungainly and awkward that must be when you're trying to have a proper standoff. Like, sorry yguys can you just not shoot at us while we get our friend out of the truck and into his wheelchair?
Ugh. What a letdown. This show has really tanked since the new showrunners took over and since virtually the entire main cast was killed off and replaced. I was never the biggest fan of Madison, but she grew on me in Season 3 and it really was a show about her and her kids, and now Nick is dead and Madison is dead and it's like we're watching an entirely different show now. Why not just make a new show instead of cramming this new cast together? It's all so jarring. Morgan makes no sense on this show. I can't stand him and I can't believe they've actually made this show into a "let's help people" story. It was so much more interesting when Madison was playing both sides of the Otto/Native American conflict, or when we had characters like Troy around keeping us on our toes.
It's gone from a zombie show about morally grey characters to one led Morgan Jones for goodness sakes. Morgan is a fine character, as a secondary character, as Rick's mentally disturbed friend, as a moral compass for the main group. He's not a leader or a lead.
It's a crying shame that it's come to this. I am not particularly hopeful for this season, though they've surprised us before. Last season I actually really enjoyed the first few episodes before it went over the cliff, jumped the shark, killed off the best characters and introduced the lamest villain any zombie show has ever seen. So maybe the opposite will happen here, and the writing will improve and our heroes will stop acting so stupid all the time and we'll get a decent conflict.
Yeah, I don't think so, either, but it never hurts to have a little hope. Rebellions are built on hope.
