‘Fear the Walking Dead’ Recap: Cruel and Unwatchable Punishment

The #SUPERBLOODMOON has come and gone, and if the world is indeed going to end, it certainly did not do so in time to preempt this week’s episode of Fear the Walking Dead. Disappointing though that may be on the part of the apocalypse, I’d have been willing to compromise: Instead of waking up to a planet sizzling with fire and brimstone, I’d settle for a world where an iota of the outrage directed toward Game of Thrones were instead aimed at this morally bankrupt franchise, which actually deserves it.

“Cobalt,” last night’s penultimate episode of the Walking Dead spinoff’s first season, earned the dubious distinction of being the show’s most repugnant installment to date. Though its failings were primarily moral, don’t worry: the episode still found time to be an artistic letdown as well. The dialogue plodded along like Frankenstein’s monster, slamming every point to the ground like a size-fifteen boot. Multiple characters spoke exclusively in monologues, which in turn were constructed entirely from genre-movie hard-man cliches. Moyers, the Army’s resident martinet, continued his cartoonish villainy, berating Cliff for not being badass enough to shoot zombies and dropping bon mots like “I can do anything I want — I got guns!” as though competing for the title of America’s Most Fraggable Commanding Officer. (This does indeed appear to have been his fate — offscreen, just in case you were worried the show might depict something of dramatic interest.)

Meanwhile, in the internment camp where the sick are housed pending execution, Nick meets up with a smooth talker named, apparently, Strand, whom we meet when he soliloquizes a cellmate to death. Look, if my only choices were a firing squad or another minute in the company of whatever hard-truth-spouting phony came up with lines like “Body like that? It’s just the ticket to latch on to the type of man that’s gonna help her through all this,” I know which I’d choose. Carrying on like you’re the smartest, most seen-it-all bastard in the room is a hallmark of very bad comic books that endeavor to be edgy (thanks, Neil Gaiman!); like so many of the cross-media adaptations of the geek-culture era, it would have been better left on paper.

And as always, Daniel Salazar, whom we learn this week is literally a fascist war criminal, has it the roughest. I don’t know if poor Rubén Blades lost a bet or what, but starting every scene with “And now my speech begins” lines like “She was nine years old when she first asked me about the war” can’t possibly be any fun for an actor — or any human for that matter. Fortunately, since no one in real life talks this way, most non-actor humans are spared the unpleasantness. I mean, can you imagine? “When she was born, I knew I was looking at the only pure thing I would ever have.” “Uh, sir, you can’t walk up to the drive-thru — please come inside to place your order.”

But what Salazar says is even worse than the leaden way in which he says it. The meat of the episode is Daniel’s decision to capture and torture his daughter’s soldier-boy boyfriend for information on his wife’s whereabouts. What results is the sloppiest MASH note to “enhanced interrogation” since Zero Dark Thirty. That film, however, had the decency to be conflicted about its message that torture works, and the excuse that its makers were thoroughly psyopped by the CIA’s “cooperation” during production. Fear, by contrast, portrays the mutilation of a helpless human as the only way the characters could find out that they’ve all been slated for imminent execution. “The man with the blade and the man in the chair — they’re not different,” Salazar tells his victim. “They both suffer. Their lives are changed forever.” This is what murderers in uniform have told themselves, and anyone who’ll listen, since the dawn of time; Fear presents it as a “makes u think” moment.

And Madison, our ostensible hero, buys it! Granted, this is a Kim Dickens on Fear the Walking Dead performance we’re talking about here, so she buys it with all the passion of a woman picking up dry cleaning. But within two minutes of discovering Daniel has kidnapped a man and intends to torture him for information — “Do you want your boy back?” is his main justification, again implying that torture is both required and justified — she’s like, “Well, alright, I guess.” Later, when she sees Daniel covered with blood and his daughter fleeing in terror, she just wants to know what he found out.

Contrast her tough-guy-doing-what-it-takes routine with her fiancé Cliff, who can’t even pull the trigger on a zombie. It may seem like he’s still being presented as a morally preferable option, given that his antagonist in the scene is the odious Moyers. But his real enemy is us, the audience, and our collective memory of every zombie movie and TV show ever made. We know that you have to shoot the zombies, that it’s death not to. We know that in the world of The Walking Dead, being afraid to use guns — or knives, or machetes, or anything by which one person can destroy the body of another — makes you a coward, a failure, and a dead man walking. The moral arithmetic of the show provides no other alternative.

What makes both Fear and The Walking Dead flagship exceptional television, literally, is how they break the usual rule against assuming that depiction equals endorsement in fiction. In both shows, violence is repeatedly depicted as both necessary and, given the post-apocalyptic context, virtuous. Yes, the brutality is made to feel ugly, but it’s invariably less ugly than the alternative. All of the show’s dramatic weight rests upon the idea that if you were in these people’s shoes, you’d want to do the same things to survive. And man, fuck that noise. Like the zombies locked into that stadium in their thousands then inexplicably left unguarded, I want out.

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

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GIFs: AMC