Fear The Walking Dead’s Padre Villain Reveal Is Astonishingly Stupid

I’m running out of patience with Fear The Walking Dead in its final season. Sure, I’ve thought this show was garbage since partway through Season 4, but the fact that they haven’t learned or made any changes to improve things in all these years is just too much.

Three big things happened in ‘Odessa’:

• Daniel returns. He’s the “Commander” of a group of parents fighting back against the Bird People. When he see Madison—for the first time in a decade—who he thought was dead, he seems mildly surprised. Everyone is phoning it in this season. Daniel is also no longer suffering dementia, which, uh, you know it goes away with age. Or something.
• We learn that Finch is still alive. The radiation worked. I assume it only works to stop a bite from turning you similar to how cutting off a limb stops a bite from turning you. So it’s not a cure, really, but just a treatment. He seems fine, so I guess the radiation wasn’t that bad?
• Finally, we learn who Padre is (though not really why the place and the person are both called that). It’s Shrike’s brother, who we encounter first in a flashback. Basically their dad is a big military guy trying to make the apocalypse a better place and they follow him on a mission where he forgets his binoculars. The brother is so worried about this that he runs after him, gets surrounded by zombies and their dad shows up and saves them but dies in the process (as do all his heavily armed soldiers, offscreen, in the span of two minutes . . . somehow).

This revelation is pretty stupid. The brother is the big bad guy but he’s a total wimp. He comes across as completely stupid and cowardly in the flashback, which doesn’t exactly inspire fear in us in the present. Why these two are kidnapping kids and taking them here is unclear. This was not their father’s mission or what he told them to do when he died.

Other dumb crap:

• When Madison asks June how her kids were after the stadium June says they were unrecognizable, but she never saw Nick after that point.
• About a dozen times a group of characters with guns surprise ambushes another group from the bushes. I’m not even kidding. It’s so bad.
• I don’t understand how Mo knew that something bad was happening at the train, or even where the train was. I don’t understand how she and Dove got past the guards onto the train.
• When they go figure out who Padre is they have Shrike hostage, but then they just agree to have Madison taken back to get bitten on the train . . . why? Did they forget they had a hostage? Good thing Commander Daniel was waiting to pop out of the bushes and ambush Shrike and her people again!

I don’t know, folks. This is just truly horrible television. It’s on another level altogether. Bringing back Madison was pointless. All these characters running into each other again after all these years is so silly. And why would Madison tell the people Daniel has been leading this whole time that they should get Morgan to be their leader? She barely knows Morgan. He was going to kill her last week. He’s probably the worst leader in any Walking Dead show—even worse than Rick Grimes!

The biggest question, however, is why AMC hasn’t canned these showrunners and brought in someone competent. What a waste. This show stinks.

P.S. My bird name is going to be Pterodactyl. Readers gave me many, many great suggestions and I was tempted by many of them, but I figure picking this one means I won’t accidentally pick one taken by a character in the show. Oh, and you have to pronounce the P. Puh-terodactyl. Like from Gravity Falls.

Pterodactyl out! (He said, zipping away on his magical flying walkie-talkie to go make up for all the bad things he’s done.)