This season's premise makes two deeply flawed assumptions:
This season looks ugly. The colour palette has become super boring and the camera is constantly doing stupid things. The editing is awful and the show is really bad at keeping flashbacks and present clear and separate. It was bad at it before, but it's become worse. One of the central 'mysteries' of this season is "what happened to Tyler?" which is a question the audience already knows the answer to, so all the drama that comes out of it is boring and frustrating and unnecessary. They try to address some themes of sexual assault, but they don't have anything profound or nuanced to say about it, or really anything to say about it beyond the basic platitudes of "my story" and "down with the patriarchy".
This season is just a mess
2/10
"Stop acting like this is normal!"
I, like most people, am a fan of the Walking Dead comic books. I, like a lot of comic book readers, believe it either should have ended already or should wrap up very soon. I, unlike apparently quite a lot of people, do not find the Walking Dead television show to be anything better than decent at best. Still, I figured despite that I would give Fear the Walking Dead a solid chance since the "society falling apart" part of the zombie apocalypse formula tends to be the most entertaining.
Right off the bat, Fear the Walking Dead greatly bungles the pacing of the show. Of the main characters, three of them are either useless or already insufferable, which is not a great start. It is only six episodes in to what will most likely be 1000 episodes of show since the general public for some inexplicable reason still devours zombie stuff with a spoon, but those six episodes have done nothing to really make me believe any of these characters have potential. Salazar is kind of great - mostly because Ruben Blades does a hell of a job. Colman Domingo's Strand is so mysterious and actually intelligent that he immediately gets rocketed up to the top of the Interesting Character List. Kim Dickens is a great actress but the wishy washy and frankly generic motivations of Madison Clark give her very little to work with. Cliff Curtis on the other hand has even less to work with through Travis, and seems to put next to no effort into it. Travis goes from "hey don't teach my kids to shoot guns during the zombie apocalypse" to "well guess I better start beating people to death" and Curtis doesn't add anything to either performance. So far, Travis Manawa is the front runner for the 2015 Arthur from Showtime's Camelot Award for most show shattering lead character. Looks like you've finally got some competition Ephraim Goodweather!
Things don't get much better as the show goes along. The human element and the social commentary aspects of zombie fiction have been almost entirely excised from the medium, so the success of zombie stuff tends to fall on how exciting or suspenseful or scary or whatever the actual zombie scenes are. Fear the Walking Dead sadly does not offer much in that regard either. After so many seasons of the main show, and countless other zombie properties ebbing and flowing through pop culture, there isn't a ton of room for Fear the Walking Dead to offer anything different. When it does try and ramp up and give you something exciting, it feels like it is on such a small scale that it doesn't even matter. How you can take the literal end of the world and make it feel like its more the end of a sound stage in Burbank I don't know.
The worst part though, beyond everything else, is that the child show inherits the most damnable trait of the parent show - every major moment hinges entirely on a character or characters being a complete moron. The military can't shoot 2000 zombies, Travis doesn't want somebody teaching his kid how to shoot a gun in the fucking zombie apocalypse, oh we should just leave the addict alone I'm sure that would be fine, i'm sure its just light reflecting off a disco ball or something kid don't worry about it and trust the military, sure guy who is part of the group that wants to kill us all I'll let you go since you seem so trustworthy, hey man stop beating on that guy who just shot one of us, hey do you think maybe somebody should guard the giant building full of shambling death monsters, etc etc etc. Nothing here feels organic at all, because the only way the writing team knows to move anything forward is by either killing somebody or making somebody more brain dead than the creatures they are fighting.
Fear the Walking Dead suffers from the exact same problems that the Walking Dead does, except without the comic book's established plot and a constant stream of strong acting performances to fall back on. This makes it a far less enjoyable watch. It still has room to grow and isn't nearly bad enough to completely give up on, but these six episodes are not a strong start.
WATCH if you only buy new Call of Duty games for zombie mode bro. DON'T WATCH if you know you won't be able to look past every character passing the idiot ball around to kill time.
