Well, that was a pretty terrible episode of Fear The Walking Dead. Not dreadful from the way numerous episodes last year were dreadful, but it’s inching inside that zone.
1 large reason this year proceeds to drag, even as it improves over last time, is the protagonist. Ginny is just not a terrifying figure. Her organization is not particularly scary compared to other nefarious factions we have fulfilled in all of these shows.
And like the major show, I’m just kind of burnt out on all these factions constantly warring with one another. In the primary show, once our heroes arrived at Alexandria everything started to go back. Largely this was due to the enlarged cast size and scope of the entire world itself. Alexandria was united by Hilltop, Oceanside along the Kingdom. You will find Wolves and Saviors and then Whisperers to compete.
Over on Fear, we moved from a pretty intriguing and far more organic dispute over water rights between a largely white survivor settlement and a Native American tribe (factions which were grounded in the actual world and made sense) into a parade of cartoon villains such as the group that”surrounded” the scene, the mad black lady who poisoned people, Logan’s group of”are they really bad guys or what?” And eventually, Ginny’s Pioneers who somehow were not around for any of the previous stuff but are now everywhere and may find you no matter where you go. Oh, and the folks are searching for the key Morgan has who spray-paint”The End Is The Beginning” here and sundry.
Top all this off with Sherry’s fresh set of rebels. They wear scary masks which could have been used in a far more interesting way but are just to conceal their identities from Ginny’s Rangers. Sherry has taken up with these folks and neglects to mention it to Dwight, instead of letting them abduct him and drag him back to their HQ.
What follows is a whole group of maudlin, melodramatic tripe. If you were hoping to get an interesting reunion, or perhaps only a joyful one, involving Dwight and Sherry I’m sorry to say you’ll be disappointed. Sherry does not seem to care about Dwight whatsoever. She starts it all off by lying to him, puts him in huge danger, and then cuts out him when they go to assassinate Ginny. When he goes to stop her she gets angry and begins crying and hitting him yelling”why do you have to always make it so hard!?”
What the hell, Sherry. Dwight just followed you throughout the country and finally found you and this is how you treat him? Ultimately she tells him to go. It is important to her to kill Ginny than it’s to be with her estranged husband. She feels remorse over not shooting down Negan when she had the chance. She worries that Dwight will turn in the guy he was when he worked for Negan.
In other words, this is just another great example of people in Fear not acting like real people. Should they love each other, they are not going to let this stupid group of cowboy villains come between that. And nobody in the real world talks about others as if they’re”likely to become the man you were” blah blah blah. Give me a break. This whole”I will stop you from shifting into something horrible” crap is just as awful as Morgan’s insistence last season that everyone compensates for the bad things they have done to somehow redeem themselves.
It is so blatant and over-the-top. In the real world, people simply don’t speak in this way. They don’t explicitly tell one another they need to rescue themselves from reverting into something they had to be (while also mentioning they now remind them of how they were even further back in time).
So Dwight just reunites with Sherry for a hot minute before matters go south and they are torn apart again. I am not sure they get to have this series, and The Walking Dead in general, have something such as an allergic response to gender and romance. The prior is barely even hinted at and the latter is always foiled and hurried for stupid reasons. Like when Al fulfilled the CRM chick and they just kissed and did not go all of the ways. Why? Here we’re in a zombie apocalypse where bodily intimacy is incredibly limited as a result of a dearth of potential partners. I don’t think people are going to show much restraint once the chance arises.
Morgan shows up, of course, since Texas is a very small country where it is super simple to run into individuals, and walkie-talkies can reach every corner of it (but also you require a plane to achieve specific regions for some reason). He wants the Masked Marauders to cool their heels and not try to carry out Ginny right away since they have people who might be retaliated against (though this could be the case when masked bandits murdered her is beyond me). Dwight is so gung-ho about carrying out the murder before Sherry has him locked up with Al and Morgan and then he has his change of heart and goes to prevent her. Personality motives reverse such as coins in this show.
In the end, Ginny is not murdered and our star-crossed fans are once again at odds. I am left feeling like Sherry could have rather not been found, though if that is because it’s the truth or since the show is poorly fumbling this whole issue is not ascertain.
The one thing I liked about this episode was Morgan admitting that he tried to get everyone to perform what he thought was the ideal thing before and that was not fine. Of course, I will blame that entire approach on the bad writing rather than on Morgan himself. For some reason, they believed having everyone become a miniature Morgan last season proved to be a fantastic idea. And we have characters bringing up watching their small PSA at a gasoline station this season, which brings back the bad memories.
We’re not in that degree of dreadful but this episode felt unbelievably weak, even weaker than episode 3 which was the very first real low point of Season 6. Dwight and Sherry’s reunion is a letdown. The conflict continues to feel contrived. Ginny has been only looming large for the characters in the series while viewers scratch their heads and wonder what the big deal is. I’m sick of all of the factions. I am tired of the setting. The storyline feels like it’s treading water at best, and also the season, although an improvement overall, nevertheless feels wildly uneven.
P.S. I forgot to talk about the scene where they return Al’s SWAT van. The plan is apparently to ride it down with horses and then climb in and overpower the driver. Somehow horses figure out how to keep up with the armored vehicle despite it being, you know, a vehicle that could do at least twice the speed of a horse. The driver uses the machine guns to attempt and shoot the riders although they’re too near the van to maintain the line of fire. He would have easily just run over them by pulling hard to the left. It’s an utterly ludicrous scene that made no sense whatsoever.
