‘The Raft’ Gives Dwight And Sherry A Chance To Keep Sucking

A lot of little things don’t make sense in Fear The Walking Dead these days. A lot of big things, too. One big thing? How radiation works in post-nuclear fallout Texas. It seems entirely random. A building here is so toxic it will kill you in days. A forest that looks radiant and is swarming with radioactive zombies, however, is perfectly safe.

Another big thing: Why everyone is fighting over Strand’s ridiculous ‘tower.’ It seems everyone is choosing sides and fighting passionately against each other, but the actual utility of the tower remains questionable at best. What is everyone doing this for? Why? What is the point? Nobody seems to know beyond “Strand bad!” Why take this office building when you could just leave nuclear Texas behind altogether?

Little things abound. The episode opens to Dwight talking with Sherry talking over their walkie-talkies. She lies to Dwight, telling him she’s on a supply run when in fact she’s standing near a raft that looks like her ticket out of dodge. Dwight tells her he’s gotten an SOS and has told a random woman to meet him in a random forested area.

He goes to meet her and shows up just in time to save her from some radioactive zombies. Then Sherry also shows up just in time to also save her from yet another radioactive zombie. The woman is confused about the radiation and Dwight says “You’re not from around here are you?” She says she isn’t and doesn’t know what’s going on because she’s been on a boat “for days.” But she knows about Strand’s tower because she’s heard the “message.”

Dwight tells her she should go there since she’s looking for her missing kid and I guess maybe he’s there. Sherry gets mad at him for this because they’re about to go to war with Strand. Sherry gets mad at Dwight a lot.

A moment later Morgan pops up on the walkie-talkie asking for help. Somehow he’s gotten all of the zombies from Strand’s moat to follow him and baby Mo. I remember back when Rick and company planned an elaborate (and rather foolish) scheme to get the walkers out of the quarry and lead them far away from Alexandria. This operation took a bunch of survivors and tons of coordination, but of course here in Fear this can all be accomplished by Morgan and a baby—who wants to “hand them off” to Dwight and Sherry.

We cut back to Morgan who lamely tells baby Mo “I truly hope you don’t remember any of this when you get older” before adding, “I’ll be happy enough if you just get older.”

I’m not sure why Strand just let Morgan take his zombie defenses away. Surely he could have played some loud music to draw them back?

In any case, as soon as Dwight and Sherry show up, so do Strand’s rangers who start firing indiscriminately at Morgan and company—despite the fact that they have the baby with them that they’re apparently trying to retrieve, presumably alive rather than filled with bullets.

Instead of handing off the zombies, Morgan hands Mo to Dwight and Sherry. “This could be a good thing,” Dwight says. “If we can do it with her we can do it with one of our own.” He wants to have a baby and he’s been trying to convince Sherry to start a family. She replies with kind of a funny line: “Yeah I don’t think I’m reading the same tea leaves as you.”

Seriously.

Sherry and Dwight—who she calls “D”—escape and run into Wes, who is now working for Strand. Following Luciana’s betrayal of Daniel, Wes appears to be a hardcore Strand supporter now. It’s quite the change of heart.

Sherry shoots the ground at Wes’s feet and he’s tossed from his horse. Dwight and Sherry escape again, but they probably should have just put a bullet in Wes’s head now that he’s one of the “bad guys.”

Morgan has also escaped from his pursuers, though he finds himself in what is quite obviously a bombed out area and isn’t wearing a mask. You only need to wear a mask when it suits you, it seems. And radiation monitors are in plentiful supply.

In any case, a car explodes and Morgan takes cover in this radiant hellscape when someone reaches out and pats his shoulder. Morgan is startled but it’s Alicia. They talk for a while uttering lines like “We only get one shot at this and we’re not ready” though I’m not sure why they only get one chance at taking the tower or, for that matter, why it’s so important to begin with.

Meanwhile, Sherry finds Dwight and Mo having some fun together. Dwight has crafted a DIY mobile for the baby out of car air-fresheners and is happily spinning it for her. Sherry, naturally, is upset by this. “What the hell is that?” she snaps.

“I call it an auto-mobile,” he jokes back which, as a dad, I admit I find very funny. Sherry…not so much.

“Jesus,” she says, rolling her eyes. “What?” he asks, clearly hurt. “She likes it.”

“I’m trying to keep us alive here,” Sherry says disdainfully.

“I’m trying to give her a reason to stay alive,” he offers back, though really “I’m keeping the baby entertained and not wailing” is a good enough reason.

Dwight presses her, trying to figure out why she’s acting so crabby (though this seems to be her default personality so I’m not sure what he’s worried about). When she finally cracks, her admission is a bit shocking.

“It’s just hard for me to see you with her like this,” she says. “Like what?” he asks. “I dunno, laughing and smiling and making dad jokes,” she tells him.

“Why?” he asks.

“Because, D, we’re not gonna have that.”

“You don’t know that.”

And okay, I get that she’s upset that they might not have a baby together but it’s still weird to get all angry and grouchy because Dwight is showing that he could be a good dad, if they could actually make it work.

The awkward conversation is broken by Luciana on the walkie-talkies telling them not to come to the nuclear submarine. “The engineering compartment is starting to leak radiation!” she tells them. They’re evacuating the sub. (I am rolling my eyes so hard as I type this).

So Dwight and Sherry and Mo can’t go back. They have to bail. Dwight grabs Sherry’s bag and tells her to grab the baby. Sherry flips out—she doesn’t want him to look in her bag. So obviously he does. It’s filled with navigation charts. She admits she got the emergency raft from the sub—but not for her, for Dwight.

In one of the more strained, bizarre conversations in this show Sherry then reveals that she got the raft ready for Dwight so that he wouldn’t go over to the dark side and start working for Strand—because he did that with Negan back in the day. It’s . . . so deeply condescending I can hardly believe it. Sherry is just a terrible, manipulative person to the core.

“We’ve been over this before!” he shouts at her. “It’s not gonna happen!” I’m honestly not sure why he’s still with this woman, or why she chose to stay with him.

“You actually think I’d throw in with Strand, don’t you?” he asks. “Well it happened before,” she says, “I just don’t want it to happen again.”

“That’s bullshit!” he says, which it is. A moment later, Wes and his rangers show up. Wes is immediately in charge of a bunch of grunts, it seems.

Dwight now plays a little con on Wes, pretending he wants to give over Mo if Strand will make good on his offer to take them in. It’s a ploy. He takes down a ranger and buys time for Sherry and Mo to escape. Wes tackles Dwight as Dwight shouts at her to run. It’s . . . kind of a goofy moment since Dwight and Wes ought to be evenly matched.

We cut back to Morgan and Alicia. Walking all calmly in front of a massive train of zombies, just all slow and relaxed like no big deal at all. No big deal at all having a thousand zombies following them.

Their earlier conversation is essentially repeated—we’re not ready, we need to act now, blah blah blah. But this time Morgan reveals new info. Grace recorded “songs for Mo to listen to” while John Dorie Sr. ‘secreted’ her out of the tower and hidden amidst these songs is a message from Grace telling Morgan to attack now or never. “We don’t have much time,” she tells him, instructing him to take Mo as far away as possible. If they don’t take the tower, he’s going to take Mo far, far away.

“And I don’t want to leave, not while we’re barely hanging on,” he tells Alicia, as though that’s not in and of itself a good reason to leave!

“We’re not ready!” Alicia says again. “We’re outnumbered, ill-prepared (do people say that outloud?) and sick” she says.

We cut back to Dwight and Sherry, wandering through the rubble of what appears to be a nuclear-blasted area but not wearing their gas masks.

They stumble on the remains of the Franklin Hotel where the bunker Alicia was hidden in was located. Surely this must be a very radiation-heavy area but…I guess they’re okay without masks on. They start to fight about going through the radiation and finally Sherry admits the truth: “I think I might be pregnant,” she tells him, which is weird since moments earlier she told him she wasn’t sure they’d be able to have a baby which is why she was acting so grouchy.

Into the bunker they go, Mo crying in her little radiation-proof chamber like some baby in Death Stranding.

Dwight says they’ll find her a pregnancy test and Sherry admits she already took one. But she hasn’t looked at it yet.

“What do you mean you haven’t looked at it yet?” he asks her. Sherry once again talks about not wanting to go to Strand’s tower because it’ll “destroy all the good parts of you” as though Dwight would just immediately turn into a bad person going there, despite already having gone there and not turning back into a terrible person. This show has zero coherency.

Just as they’re about to look at the pregnancy test, the rangers how up and they have to leave.

We cut back to Morgan and Alicia. Someone has let out all the zombies from the crater they’re trying to take Strand’s horde of zombies to (because of course). They radio Dwight and Sherry to let them know—and Sherry points out that “if we can’t dump the walkers we can’t take the tower.” Okay sure this all makes sense. Surely Strand wouldn’t be able to retrieve all the walkers before nightfall when they’re planning to somehow attack!

Wes and his rangers continue to track Dwight and Sherry and Wes continues to be more evil than we’ve ever seen him before, which okay. I like evil Wes better, not gonna lie.

Anyways there’s a chase sequence and some superfluous zombie attacks on Wes and his rangers and then Dwight and Sherry sit down to take a look at that pregnancy test. What do they find out?

Well, I mean obviously they’re pregnant! They’re such a cute and functional couple and the zombie apocalypse in a nuclear wasteland is totally a great time to have a baby that totally won’t have any birth defects or anything. Good call guys!

And to think, we could have a fascinating struggle between Madison and her kids going on right now! A character-driven drama that tested our loyalties and made us care about both sides. Instead, well…

Dwight, Sherry and Mo escape the bunker through a tunnel that leads them directly to where Morgan and Alicia are chatting away. Alicia gives Sherry her stupid pipe weapon. “You should keep it,” she says. How sweet. Gosh this show is sweet and sentimental.

Anyways, everybody meets up ready to attack the tower but Morgan decides he needs to take baby Mo—on the raft—to safety. There are some heartfelt goodbyes between him and Alicia. I have to admit, I feel utterly nothing during any of these moments. No feelings at all. Not anger, not pain, not sadness, not joy, not love, just apathy and impatience. They have ruined all of these characters so entirely and set up such a nonsensical conflict.

Frankly, I’m just shocked that Kim Dickens (Madison) is returning to this dumpster fire.

“Now we have something to fight for,” Sherry tells Dwight. But also you could just leave this godforsaken nuclear fallout Texas behind you dummies.

At least Dwight gives Morgan his auto-mobile in the end. And hey, maybe Morgan is leaving the show also. Sailing off into the sunset on his inflatable raft. I doubt it but then I’m not sure why any of these talented actors would stay on this terrible, terrible TV show. I hope they all find better gigs.

“Gotta move!” Alicia shouts, leading her army toward the tower and toward war. Over an office building. While Morgan and Mo head off like Frodo and Sam across the water.

Verdict: Another terrible episode. Another inexplicably poorly written nonsense story filled with characters we care nothing about doing and saying things that make no sense. Why the showrunners of this disaster keep their jobs is beyond me entirely. 2/10 zombies. Do not watch.

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