‘Fear The Walking Dead’ Recap: The Beginning Of The End

Given that it’s the most popular show on television, The Walking Dead can pass quite easily for one of the New Golden Age of TV’s crown jewels. The reality, however, is a lot closer to costume jewelry. Despite a grim tone typical of many iconic shows and proximity to masterpieces of the medium like Mad Men and Breaking Bad via their shared network, AMC, the blockbuster adaptation of the surprise-hit comic-book series by writer Robert Kirkman and artists Tony Moore and Charlie Adlard is striking for how little else in common it has with its antihero-and-auteur-driven era that it gives us a whole lot to chew on.

For starters, there’s no auteur to speak of. Developer and Shawshank Redemption director Frank Darabont departed unceremoniously after disputes with the network, and his successor Glen Mazzara lasted only two seasons until parting ways with the show in another impasse before current showrunner Scott M. Gimple took over. And while creator Kirkman remains actively involved, the show departed so radically from his source material almost immediately—another marked contrast from contemporaries like Game of Thrones—that the closest thing it has to a consistent creative vision is that of zombie-makeup guru Greg Nicotero. Though this lack of a singular voice is not necessarily an inherent evil—Darabont’s mawkish sub-Spielbergian sentimentality, to say nothing of his penchant for Wang Chung music cues, is certainly no great loss. But the difference from Davids Lynch, Chase, Milch, and Simon, and their heirs, from Louis C.K. to Shonda Rhimes, is tangible.

More importantly, and alarmingly, TWD’s approach to its own bloody bleakness too often takes the “anti” out of “antihero.” Even the most uninspired post-Sopranos series about the inner turmoil of men who murder people for a living generally pay lip service to the idea that their cathartic explosions of violence do more harm than good, and that our vicarious thrills must be priced against the moral cost of killing. For Rick Grimes and company, however, gore, to paraphrase Gordon Gekko, is good. Yes, the show frequently toys with the idea that the former sheriff and his roving band of zombie-apocalypse survivors have Gone Too Far This Time; in fact, the frequency with which this question is raised indicates the inconsistency of the writing. But far more often, the story serves as an ersatz endorsement of brutality in the name of survival, justice, and revenge, concepts frequently treated as indistinguishable. For The Walking Dead, killing is bad, unless you really really have to or unless they really really deserve it, in which case it’s extremely good. Seriously: When The Wire veteran Chad Coleman’s pacifistic Tyrese finally offed someone, the crew congratulated him like he’d just been bar mitzvah’d.

Normally I’m first in line to blast critics for equating the depiction of atrocity with either the exploitation or outright endorsement thereof. But in TWD’s case, the frequent recourse to redemptive violence in a world where virtually none of its massive audience will experience such situations reads as decadent at best and downright immoral at worst, a nasty and unnecessary exponent of the reactionary potential that’s been buried beneath the zombie-horde metaphor from the start. To treat “What would you do to protect those you care about?” as the central ethical question of our time is to invite the creation of imaginary enemies to justify our mental murderousness against them; the consequences of this paranoid mentality for America are as thick in the air as teargas in the streets of St. Louis.

Into this potentially toxic territory shambles Fear of the Walking Dead, the flagship’s first scripted spinoff. (The show already spawned the fawning post-game chat show Talking Dead, which in turn begat Talking Bad for the world of Walter White.) Co-created by Kirkman and showrunner Dave Erickson, this pseudo-prequel—set on the other side of the country from the original, with an entirely different cast of characters—is set during the earliest days of the undead outbreak that had already devoured the globe by the time Rick’s Rip Van Winkle act ended in the pilot episode. As such, it’s structured to withstand a primary complaint against its forerunner: It introduces us to its protagonists at a time, however brief, when they were still capable of demonstrating their love for one another in ways other than shooting dead people in the face. Or, in this case, running them over.

It establishes its more humane tone from the start. We open not with a butch, gun-toting Southern cop, but with a languid teenage junkie so androgynously pretty I spent the opening minute or so convinced he was a woman. This is Nick Clark, the burnout oldest child of a blended-family couple, high-school guidance counselor Madison Clark and her English-teacher fiancé Travis Manawa. Played by Frank Dillane, the great Deadwood vet Kim Dickens, and Kiwi actor Cliff Curtis, respectively, this core trio makes the most of family-drama material that could read as ornery and overly conflict-driven even if it weren’t just the prelude to the zombie action we’re really here to see anyway. Dickens and Curtis have real chemistry, not sexual but affectionate and above all loyal; you can see, in how they physically and verbally interact at home, at work, at the hospital where Nick ends up, and in their many trips to and fro to keep track of their kids, that they care about each other very deeply.

And Dillane—the real-life son of Stephen Dillane, Game of Thrones’ standout Stannis Baratheon—is a real joy here. As our focal character in the opening sequence, when he wakes up from a heroin-induced stupor to discover his girlfriend has murdered and partially devoured everyone in their shooting gallery, it’s his job to sell the disorienting onset of the zombie plague. He does this with a remarkably physical performance, combining the infirmity of the walking wounded (he gets hit by a car fleeing the scene and is in the early stages of withdrawal), the louche charm of a veteran con artist, the sheepish vulnerability of a prodigal son, and the full-tilt panic of someone who’s repeatedly running from or fighting for his life. And again, boy oh boy is he gorgeous. If he’s the anchor of the series, we’re off to a good start.

As for the world of the walking dead that’s also beginning here, well, you know how that goes. As with pretty much every post-millennial zombie story, there are nods to the past: The abandoned, ramshackle church setting of the opening sequence evokes a similar scene in 28 Days Later, the film that revived the genre’s fortunes, while a secondary teenage character’s portly frame, acne-scarred face, and sullen demeanor make him a dead ringer for Harold Lauder from Stephen King’s demon-plague-apocalypse magnum opus The Stand, just for example. You’ve got the usual “That’s crazy, that’s impossible, nothing’s wrong” denials, though mercifully they’re mostly issued by Dickens, who’s got the gravitas to withstand her character’s knowledge deficit relative to we in the audience who’ve seen The Walking Dead before. And yes, there are some gnarly zombie effects, mostly centered on Calvin, a chillingly preppie drug dealer played with genuine menace by Keith Powers, at least until he gets shot with his own gun and turns into a cannibalistic killing machine.

The real appeal of Fear the Walking Dead, though, is the very different time period and tone from that of its originator. There’s a delirious, almost delicious panic to be found in fiction about the opening days of a plague. The gulf between what we in the audience know will happen and what we know about just how it will happen is cavernous and vast, capable of imbuing a strange figure in the shadows or an odd-sounding news report with shudder-inducing creepiness.

With the languid pace of cast introductions common to prestige dramas, Fear doesn’t hit the horrifying highs of other works about this unique stage of a fictional world’s terminal illness: The Stand, Max Brooks’s original World War Z faux–oral history book, Justin Cronin’s magisterially depressive vampire-apocalypse novel The Passage, Steven Soderbergh’s drum-tight disease-disaster movie Contagion, the entirely flawless first ten minutes of Zack Snyder’s Dawn of the Dead remake. Not yet, anyway. But compared to its predecessor, the relative restraint and heart of this side project/flashback/spinoff may well make it the Dead to live up to.

Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) is a freelance writer who lives with Diet Coke and his daughter, not necessarily in that order, on Long Island.