Fear The Walking Dead’s Latest Episode Is One Of Its Worst Ever

Fear The Walking Dead continues to prove each week that just when we though things couldn’t get any worse and more stupid, they actually can. And hooboy can they.

The show’s seventh season may be its worst so far, which says a lot when you remember that a good portion of Season 5 consisted of our heroes and villains filming competing PSA videos on their quest to “help people to make up for the bad things we’ve done” as every character on the show was slowly written to be just another version of Morgan.

Morgan, I say this with all due respect, but you are a terrible character and between you and the new showrunners, this zombie drama is quite possibly the worst show on TV.

This is my opinion, sure, but it’s more than that also.

Ratings are lower than ever, for one thing:

Even diehard fanboys are asking you to remove Andrew Chambliss and Ian Goldberg. This is how dire things have gotten on Fear. This is a popular TWD fan account that defends even the most egregious episodes, but even he’s fed up:

Indeed. “Having these survivors bicker in radiation just ain’t it” is putting it mildly. I’d go further, however, and say that Ian and Andrew have not contributed anything to this show except a marked improvement in cinematography. When it comes to story and character development, all they’ve done is drive this show into the ground.

Spoilers ahead.

Take this past Sunday’s episode, which I am now reviewing a couple days late. My apologies. I even watched this episode early and then just lost all motivation to write about it.

In this episode, Strand has suddenly become paranoid about walkie talkies, despite the fact that literally everybody on this show has a walkie talkie. So he’s planning to kill his right-hand man, Howard, because they found a walkie talkie in his room. He claims it was planted there. When Strand is informed moments later that Baby Mo has gone missing, Howard volunteers to investigate. Strand also has John Dorie Sr. investigate.

Both these men are dead by the end of the episode.

What follows is a predictable mess, bogged down with poorly written dialogue about “legacy” because characters in this show talk in buzzwords. They wanted this episode to be about “legacy” so they just decided to have Dorie Sr. and Strand really concerned with that now.

In any case, one thing leads to another and we learn:

• June and Grace are behind Mo’s disappearance. I am so surprised. What a shocking revelation. They’re trying to smuggle the baby out so that Morgan can attack the tower. He won’t do it with the baby in there. John initially stops them when he discovers this because he’s trying to use the baby as leverage to convince Strand that he’s making a mistake acting like a tinpot dictator.
• Howard, meanwhile, gets a tragic backstory about his fraudulent historical discovery and his family so we pretty much know he’s a goner.
• John has radiation poisoning, which is a super convenient way to kill off characters! Charlie got it and is dying and now John has it because he got it when he retrieved Charlie. It’s very random who gets it and how fast or slowly it kills different characters. Again, this is just a lazy, stupid narrative cheat that the showrunners are using so they don’t have to do any actual heavy lifting. It’s embarrassing.
• John admits that he was the one who planted the walkie talkie in Howard’s room. Howard, a guy who we have seen on a walkie talkie tons of times with Strand never caring until now! Fun storytelling, bruh.
• Strand is so impressed with this act of deceit that he has Howard thrown to his death anyways, despite being Strand’s most loyal lieutenant. Yeah, that makes lots of sense. Look, I’m sorry folks, but he may look and talk like Victor Strand, but the real Victor Strand is dead. Ian and Andrew killed the real Strand and replaced him with this evil doppelganger the moment they had him betray Morgan in the submarine for literally no reason and then propped him up as a crappy, one-dimensional villain for Season 7.
• WE ARE WATCHING A SHOW ABOUT PEOPLE FIGHTING OVER AN OFFICE BUILDING. IN A STATE WITH LITERALLY HUNDRDS OF OFFICE BUILDINGS TO CHOOSE FROM. THIS IS NOT A SUSTAINABLE FARM OR A FORTRESS IT IS AN OFFICE BUILDING SURROUNDED BY ZOMBIES AND RADIATION.
• So Dorie Sr. tries to convince Strand that he’s on the wrong path but Strand won’t listen (again, so shocking!) so Dorie almost shoots him but knocks him out instead.
• Then Dorie Sr. goes and gets Mo and gears up in some RIDICULOUS armor and, noting that the baby he barely knows is now his “legacy” marches off with her through the zombie horde. Given that Strand and his people freely come and go here, there must be an easier and safer way to get out of the office building, but that wouldn’t be as dramatic.
• Dorie gets Baby Mo to Morgan who awaits him on the far side of the horde, but he’s been bitten and he tells Morgan he’ll buy him some time and goes out in a blaze of glory.

And that’s two more bodies in a season that seems to be shedding its cast like snakeskin. All the pastures look greener when you’re on a show this bad, I suppose. More on that in a separate post.

This was a goofy episode that made very little sense. They spent all this time getting the baby into the tower and now they spend all this time getting her out. It’s very silly. Fighting over the tower is silly. Staying in Texas is silly. All these contrived, convoluted plots and character motivations are silly. AMC continuing to bankroll and greenlight this very, very bad show is silly. Kim Dickens actually wanting to come back to this terrible show is silly.

Silly, I say! A pox on it!

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