Fear The Walking Dead’s Latest Episode Is A Steaming Pile Of Hot Garbage

Fear The Walking Dead is not only staggeringly stupid, it’s started ripping off old stories from The Walking Dead. It’s embarrassing and it’s hard to watch. In ‘Blue Jay’ we get a weird combination of gruesome ultraviolence (which I’d normally welcome in a zombie show) and bizarre storytelling that leaves me baffled and annoyed at every turn.

We deal with three returning main characters this episode: June, Dwight and Sherry. All three have been working for PADRE for years, but June has broken off because Something Bad happened and she’s gone rogue. Her nickname is Blue Jay. Dwight’s is Red Kite. I can’t remember what Sherry’s is and I don’t care. These bird names are ridiculous. They’re not just codenames used over walkie-talkies (all hail the mighty, magical walkie-talkies!) but in regular day-to-day speech. Because sure, that makes sense. We learn that the rat-faced woman from the last episode is Shrike.

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Remember, the leader of this group of Bird People is called PADRE. I guess they were just stuck with that from Season 7, but it doesn’t fit with the naming conventions of the rest of the group. I suppose Vulture was already taken by the gimmicky Season 4 villains. These villains, like every other group since Chambliss and Goldberg took over, are little more than a cartoon gimmick, and this episode continues to solidify just how preposterous they are. (Imagine Alicia’s horror if she discovered PADRE only to learn that it was a bunch of idiots calling one another bird names).

June, we learn, left PADRE after working for Shrike on various gruesome experiments in order to study the zombie infection. This is an idea we’ve seen used in The Walking Dead a number of times, including Season 1’s CDC arc, World Beyond and so forth. At one point, a man named Adrian who is trying to get her to help him find his daughter, Hannah, discovers her in the train where these experiments are taking place—and she’s a zombie! Which is just like the Sophia reveal in Season 2 of The Walking Dead, but much less shocking or emotionally powerful. Adrian ends up committing suicide by way of zombie daughter which is portrayed as this big, emotional scene but isn’t because A) we didn’t know or care about Adrian and B) it was just super obvious what he was going to do. ADRIAAAANNNN!!!!

The only really new thing here is Shrike using Adrian’s zombified head to bite Dwight and Sherry’s kid, Finch (good lord these bird names) in order to force June and them to work for her and PADRE since she’s the only one who can cure him, or so she says.

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This is so damn stupid I don’t even know where to begin. First off, Shrike hasn’t found a cure yet and this kid only has like an hour tops before he turns into a zombie. They can’t cut off a limb because it bit him on the chest. There’s no way any of this works as incentive. Holding him hostage might—but killing him kind of defeats the point. All the bargaining chips are gone. If this show has Dwight and Sherry and June discover a cure . . . . I’ll have some serious finger-wagging to do!

Dwight’s reaction, at least, is realistic: “I’ll kill you!” he screams at her again and again. I hope he does.

Speaking of Dwight and Sherry, the worst couple on TV does not disappoint. Remember, they were first separated by Negan way back in The Walking Dead’s Savior War arc, and then Dwight spent years tracking her down across the United States before finally finding her in Texas. Naturally, she basically told him to kick rocks: She had a new group now and wasn’t interested. It was quite cold and made me dislike her instantly. Mind you, it’s fine if she felt that way (time and trauma changes people) but she approached it so horribly and then—worse—played mind games with him. Their relationship was clearly toxic, but the showrunners keep trying to pass it off as this great love story.

Eventually they got back together and Sherry got pregnant. Apparently they were scooped up by PADRE on their escape rafts and decided to not only hand over their baby, but work for PADRE separated from one another for the last 7 years, until just before the events of this episode. They never told Finch they were his parents and just accepted that they’d no longer be together (kind of like a repeat of the Virginia arc when they separate all the characters—hey, they’re stealing their own ideas at this point! No wonder this sucks!)

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Finch, like Wren in last week’s episode, is supposed to be 7 (Wren is 8) but is obviously played by a kid much older (he looks about 12).

The showrunners and writers apparently think it’s super normal for people to start a family in the zombie apocalypse and then just give up their baby to the first group of bird-named weirdos they come across. And then, after years of struggle to find one another and fall back in love, split up again. Just because.

I don’t like Dwight and Sherry, but I’m offended on their behalf. This is not how real people act. People fight for love. They fight to stay together. They don’t give up their children to strangers without a scrap. I mean, maybe you could take your baby and go somewhere else like Alexandria you morons.

It’s utter nonsense. What an embarrassing excuse for a TV show. All I feel is scorn.

Scattered thoughts:

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• June is cutting off the trigger-fingers of PADRE collectors. Why isn’t she just killing them instead? They can still use weapons and do bad things with one finger missing. Also, why are they so easily caught?
• MAGIC MAGIC WALKIE-TALKIES, POWER, GAS, BULLETS, BATTERIES, DRUGS—I thought we were in a zombie apocalypse with resource scarcity. Fun drinking game: take a shot any time any of these things appears or they say Padre or a bird name. You will cure your antifreeze poisoning in a jiffy.
• Madison, huffing and puffing, helps Morgan escape after he tells her he’s “thinking about something I did, or something I didn’t do” (you know what it is) and she feels bad, even though he was going to shoot her last week in cold blood. He’s just got to go help people to make up for all the bad things he’s done (DRINK!)
• The acting isn’t all bad, but it’s mostly pretty bad. That’s especially true for the small parts. The PADRE collector on the radio chatter (DRINK!) talked like someone in a bad video game from the 90s.
• I love how last week, after SEVEN YEARS, Morgan, Madison and Grace all reunite and then this week AFTER SEVEN FRIGGIN YEARS so do June, Dwight and Sherry. Seven years is longer than all seven seasons combined but none of these people have made new friends or allies or changed in any way. They haven’t aged. Why even do this time jump?

I can’t even like the good things about an episode like this. As per usual, there’s some nice cinematography. I even think the leads did a pretty good job and Sherry didn’t bother me as much as usual. Dwight and June had a few good moments. But I don’t like any of them or care what happens to them at all, and I should by now.

The shocking scene of a zombie head biting into a little boy who’s under anesthesia (DRINK) should have been a powerful, upsetting, resonant moment but I was so irritated by all the crap that came before that it just felt needlessly gratuitous, especially because Shrike’s reasons for doing it—to incentivize them to help her—make no sense.

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Also, she said “PADRE wants to keep all the children as safe as possible” literally twenty seconds before chomping the boy, so yeah. Sure. Whatever. All I know is it’s a good thing I’m not playing the drinking game right now or my review might be as jumbled, nonsensical and stupid as this godawful show. I’d be wasted. Instead, only my time has been.

What did you think of ‘Blue Jay?’

P.S. I need a bird name to sign off with for the rest of this season. What should it be? Let me know on Twitter or Facebook.

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