Fear the Walking Dead, Season 1, Episode 5 - A Near Parody of Dramatic Themes
Commendable is the fact that the similarities between Fear and The Walking Dead nearly come to a halt at the name itself. Fear the Walking Dead has created its own identity, but is pushing its anti-military quota a little too heavily.
We check in with everybody in this episode, a commitment the show is willing to make despite the varying degrees of importance or interest in those scenes. They’ve been honing us and preparing us for the long road with these characters beyond season 1, which has its own challenges to take on (does it become The Walking Dead 2.0?).
Here, the soldiers become a little more human and less armed threats, though there’s plenty of examples of gun-love and power hunger that certainly reflects military procedure. In fact, it just about parodies it, and it’s difficult to tell whether its intentional. One soldier with a bruised eye explains the incident as a “momentary lapse of patriotism”. A commanding officer barks about orders and restrictions but proclaims “I can (do whatever he wants), I’ve got guns!”
But the citizens begin to fight back (or the few we actually see). There is a mildly difficult scene of torture in which our favourite troubled monologue-man Daniel Salazar (Ruben Blades) takes a knife to the arm of a soldier, and questions him severely. While not nearly as demanding to its audience as it could have been, it was a far better idea than to trade the soldier for their people (a severely dumb idea that I’m glad was nipped in the bud as quickly as it arose).
The mystery of last episode, specifically “where did they take everyone?” is answered rather quickly, but the location itself wisely stays fairly secretive. There’s still plenty of strange things that the finale is sure to answer for us, and while the opening monologue from the man in the classy clothing (Strand, played by Colmon Domingo) felt a little forced, his unlikely alliance with Nick opens a lot of doors, not to mention questions.
Travis (Cliff Curtis) is shown the horrors of what’s out there, to an extent, and his sight continues to become clearer. We see our first walker for a couple of weeks, but it plays less of a role than we might think. The true danger lies in the secret operation titled Cobalt, which the characters learn from the captive soldier. The continued progression of humanity in the soldiers is at first attributed to their youth, but many of them are shown to have families, and many of them are ready to leave in order to be with them.
Alicia (Alycia Debnam-Carey) and Chris (Lorenzo James Henrie) have a couple of scenes in which I guess they’re supposed to be bonding, but it comes across as lame teenage rebellion, and the kind of thing few of us can relate to. In some ways, it adds to the power struggle, the middle class claiming a victory over the upper class. We’re here and you’re not, so they trash the rich folks home. Its meaning doesn’t make it necessary. But it does reiterate the fact that, especially going forward into season 2, class, gender, race, it all comes last to survival.
The Salazar family continues to grow in intrigue and depth, as Daniel reveals more to us about his past, which answers why he was so prepared for the chaos to come from the beginning. The pain in his face and his voice attests to Blades' quite understated and un-glorified performance as the yet only member of the group willing to do what’s necessary. His wife’s final moments are a kind of confession, stalling the pace but no doubt questioning the ethics of the couple and their shady history.
At times the episode feels directionless, as characters stumble around passively and playing witness to the events unfolding (and that’s our job, not theirs). That being said, the ambling around and quiet chaos is something we’d have to expect from a series that’s making a clear effort to tell the story that takes place in the eye of the storm, so to speak.
It doesn’t discount that strange actions or scenes though, some of which seem like filler when we actually think about what happened. Travis’ trip to the hospital was basically a stop off for some sight-seeing and then a relaxing seat in the back of a truck while the soldiers ran around doing the fun stuff (that we don’t actually get to see). Madison, too, spends a lot of the episode watching what’s happening, being late to the party, but it’s clear that she’s sacrificing her morals to the point that she might actually be ready for the wild (almost).
With each episode, more and more time is spent outside of the refuge, and inside the refuge things are beginning to fall apart, even if subtly. It's anti-militant stance is one that's been evident for a few episodes, but that is really layered on thick here. The final scene promises the official arrival of the walkers in this series, and in a big way. While some of the character drama and conflicts have been at times hit and miss, we can still only hope that it isn’t all cast aside when a fresh threat finally arrives.
